Christmas Announcements 2017 - op25-dev

26 Dec 2017

ANNOUNCEMENTS
===============

1) New Web site
Our new web site is now on the air!  I'd like to thank Matt Ames for
his efforts and hard work in reworking content to fit the new format.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to thank our hosts at Osmocom,
Harald and Holger, for kindly offering this free resource and home for
the project.

web site: http://op25.osmocom.org/
git repo: https://git.osmocom.org/op25

2) Recent additions and updates
Several updates have recently been pushed and are in the 'max' branch
of the repo.  In addition to bug fixes in both transmitter and receiver
applications and libraries, there are a couple of new features:
 * remote terminal: the curses terminal may now run in a separate process
   or on a separate machine from rx.py, with connectivity via UDP.
 * dstar transmitter configuration:  the dstar specific config options for 
   repeater 1/2, mycall, and urcall are now supported.

3) CPU usage reduction effort
Except for the actual speech decoding process which remains unchanged,
the channel tuning and demodulation logic has undergone some streamlining.
The result should be a significant reduction in CPU usage in rx.py,
especially during idle periods.  It's possible some of these optimizations
may be slightly too radical; it would be good to receive feedback from all
users, but especially from those with-
 * crowded bands with close channel spacing
 * p25 phase 2/tdma talkgroups
 * "center frequency" set to zero in the trunking tsv file

4) New multiple rx app
Released today (Dec. 25, 2017) is a sneak preview of a new receiver app, 
multi_rx.py.  It should be considered alpha test grade.  The highlights:
 * receives DMR/YSF/P25(P1) (DSTAR almost finished)
 * an arbitrary number of concurrently active SDR devices
 * arbitrary numbers of channels/frequencies
For more information see the README file in the apps/ directory of the repo.

All of these additions have been pushed to the 'max' branch of the repo.
If you have a previous installation of OP25 you should change to the 'build'
directory of that installation and do
    sudo make uninstall
prior to pulling and building the new version.