DIY Digital Voice Transceiver

Posted Jun 14th 2007 4:38PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: misc hacks, portable audio hacks, wireless hacks

[dk] sent in the DVX project. It's a complete D-STAR implementation that's built around a digital transceiver chip, an ATMEL mcu and a digital voice compression chip. Compared to most digital radio's I've seen, this one is pretty simple. The really complex action lives in the main chips with a bunch of caps and resistors to support them. Watch out for Digikey's pricing - it looks like a major gouge after looking at the tx/rx chips on Analog Device's site. If you get them at a decent price, they could make great rf links for your projects. The link to the paper seems a bit broken, but here's the correct one.

Reader Comments

(Page 1)

1. This is a neat project but I can't help to notice how much it looks like a bomb, I think it is the battery pack hanging off the side that does it.

Posted at 2:29AM on Jun 15th 2007 by Alan Parekh

2. $6 a piece, $3.8 in quantity, or $2.85 from AD.

eh that sucks but not as bad as these 47uF 1812 caps I've used. $7.5 in singles, $1.20 ea in a reel :P

Posted at 2:51AM on Jun 15th 2007 by japroach

3. #2 holy shit what's so special about the caps?

Posted at 9:18AM on Jun 15th 2007 by akmixdown

4. big capacity smd

Posted at 10:41AM on Jun 15th 2007 by RusH

5. It'd be cool if the batteries were in the box. Maybe make a custom battery holder to hold 2 batteries on each side of the board.

Posted at 12:34PM on Jun 15th 2007 by A. Zimlich

6. I never quite know where to put batteries in my projects they always end up hanging off the side too.

Posted at 3:12PM on Jun 15th 2007 by wolfmankurd

7. I've been looking for something like this for a while. I've been stuck using spread spectrum, and a vocoder to keep RF channels discreet. If I could get digital to transmit correctly I could implement a encrypted protocol that works like AX.25 and triple DES like they use on satellite.

Room bugs and inductor taps wouldn't be so open to wisers ether..lol

Posted at 10:20PM on Jun 15th 2007 by TJHooker

8. in my experience, AD's chips are usually much more expensive from digikey than direct from AD (the ad8397, for example, is also about twice as much). The only problem, though, is that it's cheaper only if you can buy 260 of them at once. You might be able to find the chips cheaper from Newark, but from what I've heard, they usually make up for their cheaper prices (and more) from their rather outrageous shipping costs.

Posted at 10:57PM on Jun 16th 2007 by threepointone

9. As a licensed radio operator in the USA, i have to say i love this project. Why purchase a $200 radio and a $180 module to use DStar, when i could build one (even if building it cost more). Cool project.

Posted at 10:05AM on Jun 17th 2007 by neal

10. It'd be even better if there was an ASIC solution that did most of the work, with 1MB of internal FLASH for firmware.

Responding so elegantly with no obvious intrigue is pretty Dick Smith...LOL

Posted at 1:54AM on Jun 18th 2007 by TJHooker

11. I've got an IC-91A so I'll be following this closely, sounds like their working on an updated version with a better user interface. heres hoping.

Posted at 5:34AM on Jun 18th 2007 by JWebber

hack a day serves up a fresh hack each day, every day from around the web and a special how-to hack each week.

send us your hacks

have a hack you'd like to see here? tell us about it