20220317 International Standards and M17
Channel: Open Research Institute Inc.
Date: 2022-03-17

Welcome to Practical Open Source Engineering: International Standardization and the M17 Protocol. My name is Michelle Thompson and I'm your host for today. Thank you for being here. 

Practical Open Source Engineering is a series of talks from the San Diego Chapter of Information Theory Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, or IEEE for short. IEEE is the world's largest professional engineering society. 

Open Research Institute, a non-profit dedicated to open source research and development of digital radio in all aspects, is the co-sponsor of the Practical Open Source Engineering series and is the fiscal sponsor of the M17 Project. To learn more about ORI's work, please visit openresearch.institute on the web.

M17 project development is the subject of today's talk. To find out more about M17, please visit m17project.org

Technologies do not grow and mature in isolation.  To maximize utilization, organizations often turn to ecosystems of partners to drive collaboration and integration of these technologies. One structured and proven way of establishing such an ecosystem is via standardization.  Standards provide vehicles to establish best-practices and define interfaces for compliance, allowing users to have confidence that the products they employ are safe, reliable, and are of good quality.  

M17 Project has developed a new digital radio protocol for data and voice, made by and for amateur radio operators.

The protocol's voice mode uses the free and open Codec 2 voice encoder. This means there are no patents, no royalties, and no licensing or legal barriers to scratch-building your own radio or modifying one you already own.

This freedom to build, understand, and innovate is core to amateur radio, but has been missing from the commercially available digital voice modes. This is part of why amateur radio digital voice modes have largely stagnated since the 1990s and we're almost wholly dependent on commercial products that aren't well designed for amateur radio users.

Protocol specification can be found here: https://spec.m17project.org/

Erin Bournival is a Distinguished Engineer from the Office of the Corporate CTO at Dell Technologies. 

She is an experienced Technologist with a demonstrated history of working in the Information Technology industry. Skilled in system architecture, Virtualization, Storage, the Internet of Things, Digital Twin, and National/International Standards development, Erin illuminates the process of international standardization for a promising open source communications protocol called M17. 

Please welcome our speaker.