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

[Tom Azlin N4ZPT]

Make that IMBE for first generation P25. Still a DVSI product.

Royalties - seems like a bunch of urban myths here. The DVSI site says 
no royalties or licensing fees for buying their vocoders chips and 
putting them in radios. see http://www.dvsinc.com/products/a2020.htm for 
an example.  I did not have to pay any royalty to buy the AMBE vocoder 
chips. something like $8 for surface mount and $18 for DIP in volume. I 
got mine for $23 each.

Might be royalties to build to APCO Project 25, DMR, etc. standards. But 
no royalties to build to the JARL standard or use an AMBE vocoder seems 
to me.

73, tom n4zpt

On 1/6/2012 2:05 PM, Stephen H. Smith wrote:
> However, the "secret sauce" AMBE (Advanced Multi-Band Excitation) codec
> used for voice coding/decoding (that compresses analog voice to a 4.8 or
> 2.4 kilobits/sec data stream in P25 systems) is NOT! It is the
> proprietary intellectual property of DVSI (Digital Voice Systems Inc)
> who collects a royalty of anywhere from $20 to $100 PER RADIO.