[aprssig] OT: Yaesu to release digital amateur radio gear

[Stephen H. Smith]

On 12/29/2011 12:15 PM, Bob Bruninga wrote:
>> The Motorola radios all have GPS built in and feature
>> "caller ID" as well as text-messaging. I termed
>> MotoTrbo to my local club as "APRS on steroids."
>> There are some people working on aps that will grab the
>> GPS data sent by the radios and port it over to APRS.
> I want to hear more about this and particularly how we can crosslink the
> MotoTurbo texting with APRS texting!
>
> Bob, WB4APR
>
>

MotoTRBO is just a catchy trade name for the open-standards DMR (Digital Mobile 
Radio) originally defined and documented by ETSI (European Telecommunications 
Standards Institute).  The DMR standard provides for the transport of a 4800 
bits/sec data stream, mostly used for digital voice, but often also used for 
data as well.  The name MotoTRBO was  invented by Moto marketeers to create the 
impression that this protocol is somehow unique to Motorola.

On the other hand, Moto's text messaging and GPS posits ARE proprietary 
applications layered on top of the generic DMR 4800 bits-per-second data 
stream.    There may be serious licensing/intellectual property issues 
surrounding these formats if you reverse-engineer the data formats involved and 
create non-Moto third party apps to decode this stuff.    [Thank the vile 
Digital Millennium  Copyright Act (DCMA) for this situation that criminalizes 
reverse-engineering software functionality, even if you then write completely 
original "clean" code to achieve the same ends.]

However, I don't know the legalities of taking the data spewed out  of a 
licensed Moto decode routine (figure on major bucks per radio for the 
privilege) and then re-encoding it in an unrelated format such as APRS.


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Stephen H. Smith    wa8lmf (at) aol.com
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Home Page:          http://wa8lmf.net

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