FreeDV – Open Source HF Digital Voice for Amateur Radio product image

FreeDV – Open Source HF Digital Voice for Amateur Radio

(5/5)
Review by Joshua Morris on
Get Open Source

Review

FreeDV takes the idea of digital voice on HF and makes it truly amateur-friendly: open source, experimentable, and designed by hams for hams. It uses the low-bit-rate, patent-free Codec 2 vocoder to squeeze clean speech into much less bandwidth than analog SSB, which can help reduce fatigue and QRM on crowded bands. You can run it as a cross-platform GUI app with a basic sound card interface and a regular SSB radio, or dive deeper with projects like ezDV and SDR integrations. If you care about advancing the state of the art on HF without locking yourself into proprietary codecs, FreeDV is absolutely worth putting on the air and experimenting with.

✓ Pros

  • ✓Fully open source stack built by and for amateur radio operators
  • ✓Uses patent-free Codec 2 for narrow, low-bit-rate digital voice
  • ✓Runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux with common SSB rigs
  • ✓Active development with new modes like RADE pushing voice quality forward

✗ Cons

  • ✗Setup and on-air use assume you're comfortable with basic station integration and HF quirks

Specifications

TypeOpen source HF digital voice software
LicenseLGPL-2.1+ (varies by component)
PlatformsWindows, macOS, Linux
Modem ModesMultiple FreeDV waveforms including RADE and BBFM
VocoderCodec 2 low-bit-rate speech codec
Typical Use CasesHF digital voice QSOs, experimentation, narrow-bandwidth voice links

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