GlobalSDR is

a founding concept for a worldwide ham radio enthusiast "Maker" style community project. Anyone can contribute. Anyone can benefit.

an organization that renders the concept legitimate and governed. A not-for-profit organization for the needed presences, rules of the road and connectivity across the community.

built around as a software-defined radio, or SDR, a malleable system capable of being configured, reconfigured and grown by exploiting, effectively, a library of hardware designs and software that create a usable SDR that can be built up by individual community members. There may be various, different SDR instantiations within the project appealing to differing background abilities, available tools, capability aspirations, levels of individual effort, affordabilities and technical points of view. It is anticipated that most participants will be leveraging the abilities of others, shared in documentary contributions.

hobbyist open. No commercial propriety or exclusivity over the project commons itself, where commons is defined as the documentary libraries as above. Beyond this, entrepreneurs will be able to bring their products to the community, but they cannot stake out any of the "real estate" of the project commons. This is the way many ham collaborations are being built today. Basically, the contributors effectively own the software (by extensible GNU license) plus any hardware designs brought to the community and placed on the community hub, e.g. github.

initially aimed at HF ham radio bands, the GlobalSDR project anticipates that early project designs, particularly hardware platforms hosting software, can most easily be implemented at lower frequencies. However, there is no reason that GlobalSDR project designs and software cannot be initially aimed at, or revised upward to, VHF and above, or MF and below. SDR simply doesn't care!

 

 

GlobalSDR could be hosted and administered by a not-for-profit organization (NFPO) that provides a central authority and place for 1) establishing the project's web presence, 2) applying rules of the road, and 3) providing a clearing house function for community activities within the project. These latter community activities may arise from either "seed" activities "planted" from time to time by the NFPO, or those due to cross-pollinations of community member contributions sprouting from either the NFPO seeds or "wild" seeds from the community itself, provided they fall within the project's domain. That domain has a defined starting point, but also has a provision for amendment by the NFPO and community acting in concert.

In many ways, GlobalSDR is a constitutional-like entity, but ultimately of U.S. IRS tax status as a NFPO.

The GlobalSDR project is, by declaration, non-adversarial to government oversight and also to other amateur radio institutional and corporate entities, in the U.S. and internationally. The GlobalSDR project im is to "play nice" with ham radio at large and be considerate by not intentionally disrupting or endangering any other amateur radio institutional, corporate entity or government regulator (from FCC to ITU).

The GlobalSDR project aims to simply create one more thread of the global ham radio tapestry, where hams are the stakeholders in this case, not for-profit corporations. Nothing against those for-profits, but this is a hobbyist cooperative venture.

 

 

SDR got its popular meaning in ham radio from rig manufacturers. It was not, actually, the original meaning of the acronym in the government community where the basic idea originated. Most popular commercial rigs are DSP rigs, not true SDRs.

SDR is distinguished from digital signal processing, or DSP, for its reconfigurability by drawing from an external repository of function code modules, generally on demand. These drawn (e.g., downloaded) functions may be stored internally to the SDR, but it is SDR's key attribute that it may access novel software and configurations that were previously unknown to it, usually created well after the adoption of an SDR platform that able to accept and deploy the novel material pulled in from elsewhere. This is what gives an SDR project its scope and power.

Now, how is that different from a DSP rig manufacturer's software/firmware update process? You download any of that as well, so where's the difference? It is simply that the rig manufacturer controls the modules and basically mandates what resides on the rig. In the "truest" SDR, the end user decides what modules to download and use for their specific purposes. There's also a sort of middle ground, where networks mandate "functionalities" that must be "interoperable" with each other, a scheme that's called "federated" in government-speak. Federated waveforms, often being manufacturer-specific functions in the form of software and/or firmware that executes (only) on proprietary rig hardware but can connect to any other form the mandated functionality may take on another manufacturer's rig, is commonplace in the military-civil marketplace. And examples do exist in ham radio as well. WSPR-X waveforms and many higher rate digital waveforms are interoperable in this same way.

DSP is at the core of SDR. And any DSP-based radio system can be either "closed" or "open," but not both. Put another way, any DSP-based radio system can be "bespoke" or "evolvable," but not both.

True SDR can always, in principle, be both open and evolvable. Sure, some SDR is not, but in this project, it is. The particular SDR in GobalSDR is quintessentially open to a community, who effectively "own" the project. The particular SDR in GobalSDR is evolvable because the owning community can revise or extend its existing features and functions, or branch out to entirely new features and functions.

So in short, a GlobalSDR project encompasses open, evolvable SDR and integral DSP residing on open platforms.

GlobalSDR project objectives are "mode agnostic" - any paradigm that interesting to the contributors goes, from receive, to beacon, to transceive, to relay, and so on. The reach of what goes into a GlobalSDR project system or comes out of it can be broad. But there will be technical conventions and often both new and adopted standards to make a project system work.

Over-the-air transmission in GlobalSDR modes will generally require licensing of the user as a ham anytime that wireless powers are above regulatory "floors." But even unlicensed community members may participate in lawful ways as well. Most receive-only activities are available to unlicensed users, excepting of course where government regulations limit the monitoring of frequency bands. "Keep out" zones do exist!

 

 

This tab is a placeholder, but not for long. Here will go a list of the current efforts to create GlobalSDR.

 

 

GlobalSDR is so new that the Progress Log is empty as of yearend 2021. But fear not!

If this idea interests you at all, please go to and check out that M17 link to see what these guys have been doing at VHF. It is unabashedly ambitious. And so is the overall idea for GlobalSDR.

But GlobalSDR has a potential bootstrap. This is to create a template for the eventual SDR platform that uses existing, low cost, off-the-shelf products that plug together, modularly, to create a much simpler first architecture around a "version 0" GlobalSDR "transceive adapter," also known as a T/R switch. This switch, possibly the first design in the GlobalSDR library, can help to create a WSPR transceiver ... which is actually an alternating WSPR receiver and WSPR transmitter. Technically a transceiver, but lawfully a beacon transmitter and a corresponding receiver. Replace the beacon transmitter with a more capable design and you've got a general transceiver.

If this initial concept appeals to you, get involved by dropping me a line and letting me know your thoughts on any aspect of this. I will be building up a contact list of early responders. With that list, a prototype WSPR transceiver as Exhibit A, and a detailed plan for going forward, I will approach a funding organization to make the GlobalDSP project take off organizationally as a NFPO. That becomes the hub for the next generation platform.