Earlier this week, the Amateur Radio Software Award (ARSA) committee selected David Rowe, VK5DGR, and his project, Codec 2, to receive the 3rd annual Amateur Radio Software Award. The award recognizes projects and their developers for technical innovation, impacts on amateur radio and community involvement. The award includes a $300 grant.
Codec 2 is a foundational project for digital voice communication on HF and VHF. It provides a royalty-free and open source codec suitable for digital voice application in amateur radio. Codec 2 enables other software and hardware projects to utilize digital voice communication without the barriers of licensing, usage fees and vendor lockdown.
In describing the project, Rowe said, “As well as speech compression software, the Codec 2 library also includes a variety of modems integrated into the FreeDV protocol to support robust open source digital voice over HF radio. We are working on improving the quality, and lowering the SNR required for HF digital voice.”
With Codec 2, David has made significant contributions to amateur radio by helping to move the community beyond the vendor controlled digital voice ecosystem and enabling other innovation previously prevented by patents. David Rowe and key contributor Mooneer Salem, K6AQ, created FreeDV, a program for digital voice communication over HF, as a reference implementation. Codec 2 is also used by the M17 team for digital voice in their VHF/UHF/GigaHertz communication protocol and applications.
About the Award
The Amateur Radio Software Award is an annual award and is intended to recognize software projects that enhance amateur radio. It aims to promote amateur radio software development that adheres to the same spirit as amateur radio itself: innovative, free, and open.
The ARSA committee is solely responsible for determining the winner of the award. The committee this year included:
- Claus Niesen, AE0S (since 2020)
- Kun Lin, N7DMR (since 2020)
- Rich Gordon, K0EB (since 2021)
For more information about the award, visit the ARSA website.
Special Event Station
ARSA is sponsoring special event stations K3A, K3R, and K3S from Friday, August 26th through sunday September 5th, 2022 to promote innovative, free, and open amateur radio software. During the event, we will honor the 2022 award recipient. As part of the special event, we encourage people to submit nominations for the 2023 Amateur Radio Software Award.