FreeDV: Digital Voice for HF

[WA6MJE]

I have been checking out new HF digital technologies and ran across FreeDV, which is designed for Digital Voice for HF. 

Previously, I had only read about Digital Radio Mondaile (DRM) for digital voice or DStar.  Thus FreeDV is new to me.  At 1100 Hz bandwidth, it seems to be efficient compared to others. 

What surprises me is that I find little about this new mode except for this website.

http://freedv.org

Does anyone have any experience with FreeDV?

Rene - WA6MJE

[KB9UMT]

Hi Rene WA6MJE,

There has been some discussion and experimenting of the FreeDV and Codec2 Topic on the Yahoo Digital Radio Group...go here:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/digitalradio/

Don KB9UMT
www.30mdg.net (30 Meter Digital Group)

[WA6MJE]

Hi Rene WA6MJE,

There has been some discussion and experimenting of the FreeDV and Codec2 Topic on the Yahoo Digital Radio Group...go here:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/digitalradio/

Don KB9UMT
www.30mdg.net (30 Meter Digital Group)

Thanks for the tip.  There is a lot of information in that group, and from what I read a lot of activity at 14.236.  One complaint was that a solid S7 or higher signal was needed to copy.  I think this is a consistent complaint across digital voice modes, you either get all of it, or it falls off a cliff and you get none of it. 

Yet, this is a great open source jump into the digital voice world. 

73's WA6MJE

[K5TED]

Tested FreeDV this past weekend. Saturday with Mel, K0PFX and Sunday with Gerry, N4DVR. The Codec 2 implementation is an improvement over FDMDV. The interface is good, with a nifty button to switch between analog and digital on the fly. It seemed that about S4-5 with was good enough to decode on a Flex 3000 using a MFJ1786 magloop antenna, and I got good reports from them.

14.236U See you there.   

[AG6EB]

nice work. I tried it over a pair of radios in the house and had good results. The audio sounds quite decent for the low bit rate. I'm not sure i've ever heard an audio codec that allows intelligibility where analog SSB + the human ear doesn't, but when it's working it sounds much better than static.

[AG6EB]

Just managed to talk to W7GDU, Pete, in Phoenix - reception on my end was mostly garbled but some intelligible speech came through. I wasn't able to get a signal report from him. I have a lot of local noise here which probably makes it difficult.