Grant Date: April 2021
Amount: $250,000

The M17 Project is an international group of Amateur Radio operators working on a new digital radio protocol that’s focused on being fully open, including the implementations.

The new protocol called “M17”, is designed by hams, for hams, and has been intentionally designed to be easy to understand and build on. It is fully open including the voice encoder, Codec2 (courtesy of VK5DGR David Rowe et al.), and the software and hardware designs are and will be fully open as well.

Grant funds will support the RF design and development, including test equipment, prototypes, and developer kits. They will also be used to provide bounties for solutions to particularly hard problems, and for the administrative work that is less likely to get done on intrinsic motivation alone. Additionally, the ARDC grant will support server hosting and similar operating costs as needed, and travel for a working meeting.

To learn more about the M17 project, and to get involved, visit their website.

Fiscal sponsorship of this project was transferred from the Open Research Institute to Deutscher Amateur-Radio-Club (DARC e.V.) in 2022.