Document # 35

ARRL Industry Advisory Council
January 2002 Board Report

Council Members:

Art Goddard, W6XD, Chairman
Bob Brunkow, K7NHE, Icom
Martin Jue, K5FLU, MFJ
Chip Margelli, K7JA, Yaesu
Paul Middleton, K4NUH, Kenwood
Scott Robbins, W4PA, Ten-Tec
Wayne Wilson, WR5S, Radio Shack
Dave Sumner, K1ZZ, ARRL CEO (ex-officio)

Terms of Reference: The Industry Advisory Council (IAC) was proposed by the Long Range Planning Committee to provide an avenue for recommendations and concerns from industry to be presented to the ARRL Board of Directors. The IAC was authorized by Board action (minute 61, July 1992).

Highlights of Activity -- July 2001 to January 2002:

1) An IAC reflector was established to facilitate communications among the Council members.

2) The Council received a letter from JAIA regarding IAC's Recommended Interface Standards for Amateur Radio Equipment. JAIA gave the recommendation most serious consideration, but stated it was too difficult to implement at this time. However, JAIA appreciates the benefits of standardization and pledged to look for opportunities to implement standards in the future.

3) The council held a teleconference with Dr. Mike Marcus, N3JMM, FCC/OET, on the topic of Software Defined Radios (SDR). Dr. Marcus pointed out how SDRs could benefit Amateur Radio and bring experimentation back into the service. Marcus suggested asking organizations such as TAPR or AMRAD to provide user support. This approach could relieve the manufacturers from the user support burden and also could provide a firewall to protect proprietary interests of the manufacturers. Lastly, Dr. Marcus proposed a reset button that could restore a radio to the manufacturer's baseline. A copy of Dr. Marcus' think piece is contained in Attachment B.

Respectfully submitted,
Art Goddard W6XD
IAC Chairman

IAC Jan 2002 Board Report

Attachment A:

Industry Advisory Council
Teleconference January 14, 2002

1. The ARRL Industry Advisory Council met via teleconference on January 14, 2002. In attendance were Art Goddard, W6XD, IAC Chairman; Bob Brunkow, K7NHE, Icom; Martin Jue, K5FLU, MFJ; Chip Margelli, K7JA, Yaesu; Scott Robins, W4PA, Ten-Tec; and Dave Sumner, K1ZZ, ARRL. Also in attendance at the invitation of the Chairman were Dr. Mike Marcus, N3JMM, FCC/OET; Steve Pan, MFJ; Doug Smith, KD6FX, Ten-Tec; and Paul Rinaldo, W4RI, ARRL. Paul Middleton K4NUH, Kenwood; and Wayne Wilson, WR5S, Radio Shack were unable to participate.

2. The teleconference was called to order at 12:00 Noon EDT.

3. Agenda Item 1 -- Software Defined Radios: Dr. Mike Marcus began his remarks by sharing his view that technical experimentation in Amateur Radio needs to be encouraged for the good of the service. An opportunity to increase experimentation lies in amateur Software Defined Radios (SDR) which also could serve as testbeds for other radio services. Examples of user interfaces needed in SDRs are modulators, demodulators and DSP filters.

Dr. Marcus mentioned earlier discussions in Japan, which focussed on issues of user support and protection of intellectual property. One approach to answering these concerns lies in asking a qualified third party such as TAPR or AMRAD to provide software mod kits which interface to manufacturers radios. TAPR or AMRAD could provide user support and could serve as a firewall to protect manufacturers' proprietary data.

Dr. Marcus also discussed the need for a reset button on SDRs that would restore the radio to the manufacturers' baseline. Thus, a recovery path is always available should an experimental software download render the radio inoperable.

Availability of a 2-meter SDR in kit form was noted. More information on this kit is available at http://www.tapr.org/tapr/html/Fdsp10.html The developer of this radio, W7PUA, was awarded the ARRL's Technical Innovation Award in 2000.

It was noted that ARRL is in the process of appointing an SDR committee to take the lead in further encouraging SDR development within the Amateur Radio Service.

4. The teleconference was adjourned at 1:04 PM EDT.

IAC Jan 2002 Board Report

Attachment B:

In 1956 John Costas, K2EN, published in the proceedings of the Institute
of Radio Engineers, the predecessor of today's IEEE, an enigmatic article
entitled "Poisson, Shannon, and the Radio Amateur". This very influential
article is often described as the beginning of commercial interest in
spread spectrum such as the common CDMA cellular phone made by Qualcomm and
others. Costas reviews the nature of HF amateur communications and
discusses whether narrowband modulation is really better than wideband.
Why did Costas write this article?

At the time the article was written, single sideband (SSB) was beginning
to emerge as the new modulation for voice HF communications, replacing
amplitude modulation (AM). Costas had built AM radios himself and knew
that building and modifying radios was an intrinsic part of amateur radio.
He was concerned the switch to SSB would irrevocably change the hobby since
non-experts could not design and build SSB equipment and that "appliance
drivers" would then dominate. He was trying to make the point that
suppressed carrier double sideband (DSB) had spectrum efficiency advantages
as well as being more practical to design and build.

Purposes of amateur service?

While this point gets somewhat lost in the mathematics of the article,
Costas explained it clearly to me while I was working on early FCC spread
spectrum policy in the early 1980s. Technology that is difficult to build
at home leads to a decline in home brewing and experimentation and a major
change in the hobby. Certainly others have come to the same conclusion.
Amateur radio is widely thought to have changed greatly in the last few
decades due to the widespread use of radio technologies that can not be
designed or built by hams with hobby-level knowledge. Building an HF CW
transmitter involves a very different level of skills than an HF SB
transmitter or UHF FM transmitter. Despite some notable bright spots in
the amateur experimental community - documented in publications like QEX
and newsletters from AMRAD, AMSAT, and TAPR - experimentation is at a low
level. This in turn has changed the nature of the hobby and makes it more
difficult to protect the special status of amateur radio bands given the
recent increased demand for spectrum from many quarters.

In parallel with these trends, computer use has spread throughout our
society. If ham radio was generally attractive to young people with a
curiosity about technology in the past, computers have much of the same
appeal and may well be an alternative that attracts young people as our
hobby did in the past.

But, there may be light at the end of the tunnel. Software defined radio
(SDR) technology is rapidly penetrating the radio technology market in both
the amateur and commercial sectors. SDR refers to transmitters and
receivers that contain microprocessors and whose functionality is
controlled by software. In some cases the software may control the
frequency synthesizers that generate transmit frequencies and tune
receivers. In more complex systems the software may control digital
filters that change more detailed parameters such as signal bandwidth and
modulation parameters. Both types of systems are available now in the
amateur market but are designed and sold in ways that make it very
difficult for hams to experiment with this software, much as they
experimented with hardware in the past. The thrust of the rest of this
article is to describe what this basic technology can do, its possible
impact on amateur radio, and the need for a dialog between the ham
community and the manufacturing community to address how to make the
advantages of this technology available to hams who purchase new equipment.

As in the scenario Costas envisioned in the 1950s, we have an environment
in which interest in ARS is waning, quite possibly because experimentation
is either impractical with today's equipment or it isn't as
challenging/interesting as other technological fields that are available,
such as Internet use and PCs. Software radios might offer a way to reverse
this trend if certain conditions are met.

Software has been used in amateur radios for many years now. Much of the
software has been microprocessor firmware inside the radio that defines the
channel spacing and band limits for the frequency synthesizer. Some
models of transceivers come with PC interfaces that allow the user to tune
the radio and perform other functions, but generally only functions that
were previously available from the front panel. In effect, the PC becomes
an alternative front panel. Useful, but not revolutionary. An example of
a very different nature is the DSP-10 project 2m software transceiver
published in QST in 1999, http://www.proaxis.com/~boblark/dsp10.htm . This
is a true software radio with published source code, however it is not
commercially available except in kit form from other than main stream
suppliers.

How might this technology impact ARS? Whereas the hams of yore could
build their own radio or modify a commercial or war surplus radio, future
users of software radios may be able to modify the software to suit their
needs or to use new developments. Users might be able to modify filter
designs in near real time to deal with band conditions. Hams might open a
new issue of QST, read an article about a new modulator or demodulator, go
to the QST website to download the software, and be on the air to check it
out within minutes. Suddenly "smart radios" that search for a hole in the
spectrum or work around band conditions becomes something within the reach
of someone with modest software skills. Indeed it is software skills that
the younger generation is interested in today rather than winding coils and
connecting Ls and Cs together. ARS could offer a new and exciting outlet
for people interested in such software experiments - tying that with ham
radio!

Why isn't this happening? Real software radios are not commercially
available! And there are good reasons why they aren't at the moment. ARS
manufacturers seem to be focusing on market share within the existing
shrinking market and are worried about their proprietary technology. This
is one of several reasons why they don't want to share technical
information about how software within their transceivers work.

Another real reason for not sharing this information is concern about user
support. Users writing software need well-written manuals describing the
system software and certainly will have questions and need a "helpdesk"
function as they write software. It probably is impractical for an ARS
manufacturer to give this level of customer support for a modestly priced
transceiver.

Possible solutions? For the first problem, I urge the manufacturers to
step back and look at the forest rather than the trees. Greater shares of
a shrinking market are not going to do wonders for the financial bottom
line - growing the market and bringing vigor back to ARS will.

For the second problem a possible solution might be to make software
interface and documentation available, but not as a standard product sold
through normal distribution chains, for such distribution would result in a
need for manufacturer support in order to keep one's reputation. Perhaps
the interface and documentation could be made available, somewhat like beta
software, through one or two advanced technology ham groups such as AMRAD
or TAPR. This group would be responsible for both distributing the
interface and software and for the support of it. In this arrangement the
manufacturer could keep arm's length away from the interface. And get out
of the customer support business for software.

One interesting hardware implication of this: In case a user does
something stupid and messes up the transceiver software it probably would
be useful to have a hardware reset that restores the transceiver to the
factory software.