iPhone Interface For Ham Radio Mates Old With New 51
jjp9999 writes "By using the same technology found in older modems, Thomas Tumino, vice president of the Hall of Science Amateur Radio Club, has invented an iPhone interface for ham radios. He told The Epoch Times, 'Today there are iPhone apps where you can use the systems in the phone — and its sound card, which is being used as a modem ... And then you connect that into your radio with an interface like this, that just isolates the telephone from the radio, and then you can do all sorts of things.'"
Couldn't have picked a worse article (Score:1, Informative)
If you want real info, with pics and video, just Google, iphone ham radio interface.
This is new? (Score:5, Informative)
It's good to see people doing stuff, but this article is a decade or two out of date.
Hams have been hooking computers to radios for a long, long time.
There are hundreds of pages on digital radio and sound card interfacing:
try
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSK31 [wikipedia.org]
http://hfradio.org.uk/html/digital_modes.html [hfradio.org.uk]
http://www.tapr.org/packetradio.html [tapr.org]
http://www.dxzone.com/catalog/Technical_Reference/Sound_Card_Radio_Interfacing/ [dxzone.com]
Bad Reporting (Score:4, Informative)
The quality of reporting in this article really sucks. The printed circuit boards on top of the tins are not 'telegraph keys', they're the transmitters and the white box is the iPhone interface. Quite where the 'sodium clouds' come in I have no idea because in thirty years of ham radio operation I've never seen one, heard of one or used one to make a contact with a fellow ham.
Ganty
Re:Couldn't have picked a worse article (Score:5, Informative)
In this application, the serial interface on the dock connector would not be sufficient. It's common to use a PC to implement ham radio modems via the PC's sound card. The radios rarely have built-in modems, and there are a lot of different digital modem protocols used on the ham bands for data, images, etc. New protocols pop up fairly often, and these days it's unusual to use dedicated modem hardware for this application instead of implementing the modem in software. Interface to the radio is via its analog microphone input and speaker output, or often via a line-level analog interface connector provided for connecting external modems.
Many radios have a serial port for controlling radio functions like tuning, and the dock serial interface would be useful for that. The actual data path would still need to go through analog I/O such as the headphone jack or line-level signals on the dock connector.
I would still be happy to see the sort of interface you describe for other applications, but this is complicated by Apple keeping the full dock connector interface specification under wraps, and only releasing it under NDA to companies that Apple deems worthy. Thus, companies like Belkin can crank out mountains of low-quality crap for the iPhone, yet an entrepreneur is effectively barred from marketing innovative hardware accessories for iPhones.
The Reporter (Score:3, Informative)