Omega Radio (Ωrf) is a new digital land mobile radio protocol for amateur and commercial use with open source a central focus.
Yes, another one.
You’ve likely heard of D-STAR, P25, DMR, and YSF.
You may have heard of M17.
MMDVM implements most of these.
If you’re familiar with M17, you may have heard of Opulent Voice (OPV) - a wideband fork for high quality audio and data purposes.
Here’s a refresher:
D-STAR is made for hams, encodes callsigns directly, and sounds terrible. It has an open protocol but and while the codec is not open, the codec used is no longer patent encumbered. There are no open implementations yet.
P25 is made for the US Federal Government, sounds terrible, and has an open protocol and voice codec with open implementations.
DMR is made for commercial users, sounds better-ish, has an open protocol but uses the patent-encumbered AMBE2 voice codec. It has two timeslots, which complicates making your own radio, but the voice codec is much more difficult to deal with practically.
YSF is made by Yaesu, which hates you but is happy to take your money. It’s a closed protocol with the same closed codec as DMR, so it sounds identical. Yaesu works to sabotage open source ham development, such as by removing access to flat audio on their repeater line (which was becoming popular for MMDVM conversions for multi-mode repeaters).
M17 is a radio protocol focused on leveraging Codec2 to allow the development of radios, focused on compatibility with existing radios with 9600 baud packet ports (flat audio discriminator output and modulator output).
Codec2 audio quality is worse than AMBE2 in DMR on average, better than AMBE in D-STAR, and most of that poor performance is because of all the things that Codec2 isn’t actually responsible for, such as handling background noise, AGC, and microphone quality. Codec2 performs great with a studio mic with no background noise, which is not the world where these radios are used.
Opulent Voice started as a fork of M17, and reuses some of the M17 framing at a much wider bandwidth and baud rate. It uses Opus for high quality broadcast audio.
Some of you like tables:
| Feature | D-Star | P25 | DMR | YSF | M17 | OPV | Ω | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open Codec | no | yes | no | no | yes | yes | yes | ||
| Open protocol | yes | yes | yes | no | yes | yes | yes | ||
| Can build own radio | maybe | yes | no | no | yes | yes | yes | ||
| Made for hams | yes | no | no | no | yes | yes | yes | ||
| Good audio | lolno | veryno | no | no | no | yes | yes | ||
| easy to type | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | lolno | ||
| occupied bw | 6k25 | 12k5 | 12k5 | 16k | 9k | a lot | 12k+? |