The birth and legacy of IRLP.

Foundations of Amateur Radio

Technology is a moving feast. New ideas spring new inventions which in turn change our lives. Amateur Radio is at the forefront of such inventions. Radio Amateurs have been until recently the only soldering iron brigade around. We've been building things for over a hundred years and we continue as a community to think of new ideas and ways to make them happen.

For example, we take technologies like AllStar Link, EchoLink, Wires and so on all in our stride. We think nothing of having our radios connected to each other using techniques other than radio spectrum.

In November 1997, when iPhone still meant Internet Phone, an inquisitive 22 year old amateur called Dave Cameron VE7LTD came up with a way to link a radio to the Internet and the first three Internet Radio Linking Project stations were connected to each other and the now global network of IRLP nodes was born.

Dave built a DTMF decoder which allowed remote control of a computer and the radio that was attached to it, and made it possible to send the audio from the radio to the sound-card of the computer, which in turn sent that audio in digital format across the Internet to a similarly equipped system where the audio was turned back into a radio transmission.

This bridging idea took off and many different systems were developed, many of which are in active use today.

The various systems all use some form of Voice over IP to transmit audio across the Internet, but there are many variations on how the audio gets to the system in the first place.

In IRLP - as I mentioned - the audio can only come in via an Amateur Radio. EchoLink uses a similar system, but in addition to Amateur Radio as a source, you can register your callsign and use several different applications on your computer or mobile phone to link into the network. AllStar takes this idea further, instead of making a point-to-point connection, the AllStar system is based around an open source telephone exchange called Asterisk and it's used to link together the various systems.

Other variations also exist. The idea of using Voice over IP techniques spawned a whole set of radio technologies that use similar methodologies to compress voice and then instead of transmitting it across the Internet, use radio waves to send them from one radio to the next. Technologies such as D-Star, System Fusion, MotoBro and DMR built on this idea. Of course these technologies also use the Internet to share information and connect users across the globe.

There is some contention around these systems. Many Amateurs consider them to be "Not Real Radio", but then I suspect if you look at the birth of SSB, you'll find die-hard CW operators with a similar complaint. The same is true for low power propagation modes like WSPR which aren't real radio because you cannot have a QSO.

Other issues in the technical sphere also exist. The IRLP software is closed source. You can only buy IRLP hardware from one place and it doesn't allow you to connect in any other way than via a radio. EchoLink now charges for conferences being registered in the system. In the past I've already spoken about Fusion, D-Star and MotoBro and their restrictions around interoperability, licensing and closed source nature.

From a practical perspective, there are also concerns about the use of these systems in the case of massive failures during local disasters and the like. If the Internet is down, many of these systems will simply become local radio networks. Coverage could perhaps be extended by creating a local mesh network, but HF radio still very much has its place in our world.

For me this is all about learning and innovation. Ultimately which system you use is up to you.

I live in a software world where Open Source rules for good reason and my vote will always go to Open Source. To be clear, I'm not adverse to making money, we all have to pay the rent, but making innovation and invention secret is not the way to go in our hyper-connected world.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB