This month I spent some time planning, investigating, and moving project wide files from individually owned accounts to project wide resources. This is part of the process of ensuring the FreeDV project is not tied to any one individual. We’ve done a lot of work since the ARDC grant started 3 years ago so there are quite a few digital artifacts (as well as the code).
Work started on a C port of RADE V2 using Claude code. The technique of using AI to assist C ports is getting commonplace now! This only took about a days effort, in particular as the classical DSP C code required for of RADE V2 is much simpler than V1. I put some thought into suitable automated tests to validate the port and have good results when testing against the reference Python code. There is still some work to do to ensure the V2 algorithms are well tested before we distribute a C library version. I will complete the C port after the stored file test campaign is successfully completed.
Most of the work this month was around planning and coordinating the RADE V2 stored file test campaign. The goals of this campaign are to gather stored file OTA samples to support the initial test results, but from a wider range of speakers, HF channels, and radio hardware. I set up a web based processing system so the test team can encode and decode their own RADE V2 samples, and worked with the test team to coordinate and guide the tests. So far the OTA results are consistent with the simulation results which is a fine result.
Thank you very much to Rick W7YC, Kanda JH0PCF, Yuichi JH0VEQ and Take JS1MAV for your samples. Take has also been contributing PAPR measurements.
Finally, I have started work on a RADE V2 paper. There are a lot of novel concepts in RADE V2, which need documenting at the professional and Ham level.