M17 is built by Amateurs for Amateurs and it is a dynamic project that has not showed any signs of slowing down yet. The M17 project spurs creativity and attracts some of the finest contributors.
There is no better tool for learning than the M17 project and just being along for the ride is a great experience. It takes me back to the TAPR days of the 1980's.
TAPR, Tucson Amateur Packet Radio, was a group of hams who got together in the early 1980s and designed their own packet hardware. Others had built packet boards before them, but TAPR sold complete kits, and that is what put packet radio within reach of ordinary operators. Their Terminal Node Controller became the world standard for amateur packet radio, and in 2007 they wrote one of the first open hardware licenses anywhere. TAPR is still going today. M17 is that same instinct, forty years on.
They did all of that with a quarterly paper newsletter and a telephone number. No web, no online ordering, no email for the average ham. If they could solve distribution under those conditions, it can be solved now.
I will say the hard part too, because I want this mode to grow. Getting on the air with M17 is harder today than it was a few years ago. It used to run on ordinary MMDVM hotspots that thousands of hams already owned, and that is no longer true across the board. Boards, kits and assembled CC1200 and SX1255 hats are out there. The catch is that the minimum order quantity is five. An average ham does not want five hotspot boards. He wants one. That is not a criticism of anyone's code. It is a distribution problem, and distribution is what decides whether a good mode gets used or stays a curiosity. TAPR understood that in 1983. The bare boards already existed. The complete kits are what changed everything. The radio side is already solved. A ham can buy an M17 handheld today, ready to go, without building a thing. Make the hotspot boards as easy to buy as the radios and I think M17 sees real growth.
None of that takes anything away from what M17 is, and what I said at the top is not just enthusiasm talking. It is what the amateur service is defined to be. The ITU Radio Regulations define the amateur service, at No. 1.56, as "a radiocommunication service for the purpose of self-training, intercommunication and technical investigations carried out by amateurs." Three purposes, written into the definition itself rather than into a preamble.
M17 is all three at once. Operators teaching themselves a new mode is self-training. Reflectors and stations linking across borders is intercommunication. Building the codec, the protocol, the firmware and the hardware is technical investigation.
An international, amateur-built protocol with an open codec, published hardware designs and open reflector software is not a hobby project off to one side of the amateur service. It is the thing the Radio Regulations were written to describe.
Chris N6JET