For many people, ham radio consists mainly of experimenting and building their own devices, often based on other people’s projects. Sharing experiences, circuit diagrams, PCB layouts and source code is therefore an essential part of the hobby. And that’s also what the open source movement is all about. As a supporter of both movements, I find it very satisfying to build my station largely on the basis of open source hardware and software or to extend the functionality of a commercial handheld radio with a community made free firmware. Another point is that this makes it cheaper to get into the hobby of amateur radio.

I therefore recently had the idea of creating a public Wiki that lists and describes available open source projects in more detail, as well as providing ready-made recipes for setting up a free amateur radio station. It should serve as a first port of call to find out what alternatives there are to commercial products or simply to get inspiration for new projects.

As I have already had good experiences with DokuWiki, I quickly decided in favour of this Wiki platform. A domain name was also quickly found, reserved and taken online. The very young and not yet very lively wiki platform can be found here:

opensource.radio

However, I can’t set up something like this on my own and therefore hope that I can find and inspire people to contribute to this wiki and create content. I have created a “How to Contribute” page on opensource.radio, which gives interested parties all the information they need on how to get involved.

In the meantime, there is also a matrix room, which is intended for communication between contributors and general discussions on this topic. Anyone interested in the project can join the room via the following link: #opensource:matrix.m0aws.co.uk

Thanks to M0AWS for providing this room on his instance.

In this room we already have a bot that informs about changes within the wiki and displays them.

I would be very happy if opensource.radio will provide added value for amateur radio in the future and if people would join me on this mission.