[CQ-Contest] Mode 516 Suggestions

[W. Wright, W5XD]

"Ethernet" sounds best to me, but that can mean lots of different things.
I'd add some qualifications. Before listing them, let me describe the end
result. You buy your radio and the ONLY connectors on it are power, 10BaseT
ethernet, and an RF connector. You plug the 3 of them in (the ethernet goes
into a 10BaseT hub).

Bring up your favorite internet browser, type in the URL for the radio, and
the radio serves up a web page with its front panel on it and feeds your
browser the received audio.

Here are the specs I think would accomplish that:

hardware:

10BaseT	100Mbps

software/protocol:

1. the radio has a TCP/IP stack and serves port 80--the default one for HTTP

2. the radio serves HTTP on port 80 (that is, the radio is a web server).

3. the "traditional" radio control commands/queries use an industry standard
RPC over HTTP. That would almost certainly be SOAP, but its a little new.
This is what the logging programs would use to control the radio. This can
be accessed simultaneous with the standard browser also talking to the
radio.

4. The radio's audio--both transmit and received--is digitized and served
over the very same HTTP protocol under a published URL. The digitization
should be according to some standard and should be available compressed.
11.025KHz sample rate, 16 bits/sample should be available, and MP3
compression should be available. The client of the web server should be able
to select the desired sample rate/compression by specifying an appropriate
URL.

5. The radio gets its IP name/address assignments by DHCP when it boots up,
and maybe a dip switch to make it come up on some fixed IP address (I think
10.0.0.n is reserved for this kind of application). I'm real fuzzy on this
part, but I am sure there is a simple and standard solution.

This list may sound like a rediculously complex/expense software product.
But it is not a big deal. There is at least one company that sells a single
chip that implements a TCP/IP stack and a web server. And the amount of
software power required to do all the above could hardly be more taxing or
complex than the stuff done by the microprocessors running the front panel
on today's rigs.

It will not be very long before your toaster comes similarly equipped. (If
the toaster industry happens to do some other variation on this, however, it
is very important for the ham tranceiver manufacturers to follow the lead of
the mass market.)

Wayne, W5XD


--
CQ-Contest on WWW:        http://lists.contesting.com/_cq-contest/
Administrative requests:  cq-contest-REQUEST at contesting.com