SDR Top 10 Has Fallen: Meet something new....

 

At the HOPE 16 conference back in August 2025, my presentation focused on the most popular projects based on key search terms such as "SDR", "Software Defined Radio", "Amateur Radio" and "Ham Radio".   

My theory was to look at how many stars were voted on by the GitHub community per project and compare against how long the project has been around in order to create a velocity score, simply by dividing stars by number of days old the project is.  While Git is just one narrow dimensional lens to observe through, it is still a good one since its a great way to capture crowd sourced ranking data.

The idea was that the faster a project could generate the most stars would mean that it captured more interest or maintained that over time and thus, would be very important to pay attention to these projects. So while not perfect, this is the best way to capture interest level from a community of people who generally all have overlapping interests.

Here are the slides, charts and data to back up the presentation if you missed it. I analyzed the top 10 most popular for each search term for a total of 40 projects overall. Below is an example of one of my "velocity" charts enabled by the star history site which can be used for exactly what I needed.

I really wanted to wait a full year before seeing if there were major changes to the top projects, so here is a short update to start May 2026 off since too many exciting things are happening. I will compare again just before HOPE 26 at the New Yorker Hotel now less than 90 days away.

Changes:  SDR

First up, lets look at the "SDR" top 10 from last year and how they compare to now. I bolded out four worth talking about below.

Last year, GQRX which is one of the longest maintained "SDR" projects was the 9th most starred project followed by SDRangel as 10th most popular. Less than a year later, GQRX has dropped to 13th most popular and SDRangel is now 11th most popular. 

In March, SDRangel released version 7.24.0 which now includes Meshtastic functionality,  which is clear evolution from the earlier Chirp Chat function designed to support LoRa based messaging.  This is nice because if you have a HackRF, ADLAM Pluto, Lime SDR or most other transmit capable SDR, you can use it as a mesh device with limited capabilities along with its many (many) other useful features.

Not much of anything has changed in the last year however with GQRX since its intent was always to be a simple and easy to use radio application for those getting started with SDR.

Shadowbroker

What is really amazing are the two new entries to the top ten most starred SDR projects less than a year later from my original analysis.  

Shadowbroker is defined as "Open-source intelligence for the global theater. Track everything from the corporate/private jets of the wealthy, and spy satellites, to seismic events in one unified interface. The knowledge is available to all but rarely aggregated in the open, until now." This project is now the 6th most popular as voted on by the community all time. 

Much of what Shadowbroker offers is functionality built into SDRangel actually, but Shadowbroker is meant to be an OSINT tool where SDRangel is more of a SIGINT tool, with built in OSINT functionality. 

It is amazing how fast Shadowbroker has obtained 5,500 stars since its first release which was only in March 2026.  From Shadowbroker's repository, here is a video showing its capability. 

A blend of true coding plus some level of "AI" vibe coding was used to come up with this and is an amazing achievement that not many are talking about Shadowbroker across the wider interwebs.  Maybe that will change soon. I sure hope so. 

It is really worth explaining why Shadowbroker is unique.  While SDRangel allows the user to show many types of location based signals like aircraft, balloons, boats, spacecraft, amateur radio people and more on a map all at the same time from directly connected SDR's, or those over a network,  SDRangel also allows some of what is received to also feed into other systems.

Shadowbroker is not just about radio signals. Its about complex situational awareness, so this is a really cool project for looking at many types of information. If you ever dreamed about becoming the "guy in the chair" this project helps you get pretty close to that, just like in the movies!.

Ground Station

Having a look at the now 9th most popular repository simply called ground-station, this project began life in October 2025 and has already gained 4,200 stars.  This is also very impressive as it touts being  a full-featured, open-source software solution for satellite tracking and radio communication. 

Designed for amateur radio operators, satellite enthusiasts, and researchers, it provides a comprehensive and easy-to-use platform for monitoring spacecraft, controlling radio equipment, and receiving live radio signals from satellites. This project was built with the help of Claude Code and Codex.

It is clear what this project is and how it was made.  Again, much of this functionality is built in to SDRangel, but can be overwhelming to some users and the new ground station project seems really nicely done.  A full understanding of its functionality can be found on the project page, which is now coming close to its hundredth release yet is still on up to version 0.4.4.  

Typically, when a project hits the v1 milestone, its considered much more mature, so there is certainly a lot more expected to happen with ground station.

Software Defined Radio

Comparing the top 10 from last year until now,  the same are all present with a few changing places in total stars, but otherwise nothing else is unique.  Clearly if you want to experiment with SDR,  its worth searching both ways, but the long form of "software defined radio" is not where things are happening compared to "SDR".

Ham Radio

There is one change in the top ten thanks to a project called HamDashboard which now would rank as 9th most popular and surprisingly helped knock down the LoRaHam project down to the eleventh spot. While the LoRaHam project is managed by the pretty famous Travis Goodspeed, here is a clear example that when a project sees no updates, it often becomes less popular. 

But, the work of Travis on areas like hacking the TYT MD-380 which helped make DMR very popular and his other projects found on his Git repository demonstrate that its worth keeping an eye on anything he is doing.  

HamDashboard by VA3HDL started three years ago, but has seen more work in the last few months. The focus is to provide a simple, browser-based ham radio dashboard that displays images, maps, web pages, and feeds in a configurable grid. It is lightweight, easy to host, and suitable for use on a local computer, Raspberry Pi, or a static host such as GitHub Pages or Cloudflare Pages. 

With projects like HamClock undergoing changes, it seems HamDashboard is becoming more popular and here is the proof to show that.  While very different than what Shadowbroker does, it seems that a need to visualize many data sources is an area that many radio hobbyists are very interested in. 

Amateur Radio

The top ten most "starred" projects found by using the "amateur radio" key term are also almost the same as a year ago.  A few projects changed total rankings, but there is a new number nine present via the APRS D project, which has been around since 2021, but only recently become more popular. 

Many changes within MKISS and AX.25 are starting to rattle thanks to the recent news about certain things being dropped from the Linux kernel but that is out of scope for this update, but still was worth a quick mention.

APRS which has been covered here at length continues to be a misunderstood or narrowly conceptualized area within communications, so its amazing that this project is one of the more popular voted on projects to keep an eye on.  

Pretty much anything related to APRS is worth keeping an eye on actually, so this is a nice place to end this article without diving super deep on this topic.

Summary

It is important to embrace the advances in technology and a great way to do that is to spend some time searching for things on Git.  The value I hope my presentation offers from last year and into this update is to demonstrate theory to fact in order to prove a point on how to track trends and uncover hidden patterns around topical areas worth paying attention to.  

A benefit for those interested in coding is you may find something you can help improve or for those not considered "coders", might find inspiration to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) by way of vibe coding to help create solutions targeted at clear problems, just like Ground Station has done and most likely a few other projects too.

Also worth noting that when it comes to "amateur/ham" radio, there is still not enough excitement in these areas to attract more innovation.  While unfair to compare to "SDR",  this is an area which many in the amateur community should be looking at for what should be next.

 

Receiving WWVB with HackRF Pro...

Dear HVDN readers the few of you who are left, it has been seventy four days since my last sin, er my last post.  As we enter into the colder months and possibly less distractions, have you been able to receive WWVB yest on your new HackRF PRO?

Of course you have not!  Early official units of this long anticipated SDR are not expected until December 2025 at the very earliest, but here is a great article dated October 31st which hits on many of my favorite topics.  Still, there is much to consume and apply to other projects or ideas you may have.

Click below for new window to open with this great article. Really, its really great! Expect more frequent content too.

Of just follow this URL if you want to feel more safe than randomly clicking an image and hovering over the URL to see if it is safe.

https://greatscottgadgets.com/2025/10-31-receiving-wwvb-with-hackrf-pro/

Behind the scenes in building a SIGINT Linux distro

Introduction

Back in October 2021 I was interested in building a SIGINT platform. I logged my journey and published an article on HVDN at that time. Little did I know that journey would have led me to build and maintain a SIGINT build tool for Linux called SIGpi for the past two years with 28 releases during that time.

Inspiration

As the saying goes, "Necessity and is Mother of invention." It started with Steve K2GOG wanting to run the latest release of SDRangel on the Raspberry Pi. SDRangel is an awesome Open Source SDR and signal analyzer tool written by Edoaurd Griffiths F4EXB. If your a long time fan of the HVDN notebook, you already know Steve is a huge fan of SDRangel.

Often your Linux distribution of choice may not have the latest version of your favorite software whether available as a distro package, Snap, or Flatpak. In fact it could be many versions behind. Some authors will have package releases on their GitHub sites ready to download and install. If not and if its open source, you will be able to download the source could from their GitHub repo source and compile yourself. While authors may provide compiling instructions, you will find yourself down the rabbit hole addressing all the dependencies the software has first - libraries, drivers, specific versions, etc. The advantage in using packages that came with distros is the package manager will take care of auto-installing dependencies and their correct versions.

Fortunately SDRangel is well-documented providing detailed compile instructions. Once I mastered that I canned the instructions into a Bash script. and shared that with Steve. After getting rid of some bugs with my script we achieved success

Crawl

Compiling code and writing shell scripts was something I had done in the past but not to the degree of calling myself a developer. But working with SDRangel inspired me to expand on that Bash script and create a script that would install a series of drivers, libraries, and applications to create a SIGINT platform for my needs and anyone who had similar one - SIGpi 1.0 was born.

SIGpi 1.0 was really just one big bash script named SIGpi_installer.sh. SIGpi 1.0 installed drivers for RTL-SDR, HackRF, and PlutoSDR SDR devices and the Soapy SDR platform which provides a vendor-neutral API for SDR applications. With my compiling and scripting skills leveling up, I could confidently choose whatever latest SDR application I wanted for SIGpi and compile and package myself as long as it was open source and the source code available. But the cost of using the latest software versions is it could take up to four hours for SIGpi to install on a Raspberry Pi.  For Amateur Radio related applications I stayed with the releases available from the distro since little changes with them.

Walk

Less than thirty days later I released SIGpi 2.0. Besides support for LimeSDR and additional applications, it introduced a text-based menu system allowing you to pick and choose what applications and SDR drivers you want installed. The menu uses Whiptail - a dialog box tool for shell scripts which is included in most if not all Linux distros. It is used by raspi-config.

Adding applications requires ensuring their dependencies are installed as well. Since many applications have same dependencies, I broke SIGpi install into stages where the dependencies for all applications would be installed before installation of the applications themselves. The stages were:

• Run OS update
• Setup directories and desktop menu skeleton
  
• Install devices
• Install dependencies
• Install Libraries
• Install Applications
• Install Desktop Menu
• Reboot system
  

The staging model continues to this day but evolved from functions within a single install script to nested scripts called by the install script starting with SIGpi 3.0.

Run

To end users, the evolution of SIGpi from 3.0 to 4.1 varied in the applications supported. But much of the development was focused on the underlying architecture of the SIGpi build to facilitate ease of updates. First step was to simplify the development process in producing releases. The second step was to extend that so end users can perform application updates themselves through a simply command line process.

For SIGpi 5.0 I created a package management system akin to APT as used by Debian and Ubuntu. SIGpi management differs in that it is source neutral. Source could be a distro package, local package, Snap, FlatPak, or download/compile/install from source code.This started with maturing application specific nested scripts used by the SIGpi_installer into "SIGpi Package Scripts." The package scripts would be used by SIGpi_installer and a new command-line script called SIGpi - a front end to the package scripts.

Usage: sigpi [ACTION] [TARGET]
          ACTION  
                 install   install TARGET from current release
                 remove    remove installed TARGET
                 purge     remove installed TARGET and purge configs
                 update    check to see if new TARGET available
                 upgrade   upgrade TARGET to latest release

          TARGET
                 A SIGpi package

The update command checks the SIGpi repo if there is a new release. If the response is "update is available" then you can run the upgrade command and the target will be updated to the new release.

SIGpi update sdrangel

Update is available 

SIGpi upgrade sdrangel 

Fly

Compiling applications like SDRangel and GNUradio on the Raspberry Pi contributes to more than half of the install time for SIGpi. Time is the price you pay to run the latest versions. To improve the install time I realized I needed to uplevel my skills again with the ability to create Debian packages. After some research I discovered the checkinstall tool as a simple way for creating Debian packages from compiled source. For SIGpi 6.0 I created a number of Debian packages starting with GNUradio and SDRangel that could be download and installed as part of the SIGpi installation process. I had now significantly reducing the install time to just over an hour.

I updated SIGpi package management with hidden developer options to build Debian packages of supported applications.

Usage: sigpi [ACTION] [TARGET]

          ACTION  
                 build     compile and install TARGET from current release
                 package   compile and create Debian package only

          TARGET
                 A SIGpi package

SIGpi 6.0 also saw the deprecation of 32bit for 64 bit.

Idling

SIGpi started with support only on Raspbian OS (32bit) for the Raspberry Pi 4. When 32bit support was deprecated, SIGpi not only migrated to Raspberry Pi OS (64bit) but expanded to include Ubuntu on x86-64/AMD64 architecture. The change was not only in response to the RPi hardware "famine" that was out there, but RPI pricing was reaching the point for serious consideration of low-end Mini PCs. While we test for those platforms, know SIGpi should be able to run on most Debian-based AMD64 and ARM64 systems.

Throughout the journey I kept considering whether SIGpi should continue as the build kit it is or be a full distro where you download and install a full OS image like DragonOS or DigiPi. What I kept coming back to is releasing a distro image may be easier for me to support and develop but it would be at the expense of limiting end-user experimentation integrating SIGpi into their own creations.

Another consideration has been whether to start using Docker and create docker images for complex SDR applications like SDRangel. Again what may be easier for the developer would be at the expense of experimentation by end-users. Docker adds overhead that the end-user would need to be familiar with.

Land

Many open source projects come and go for a variety of reasons. The best reason for closing a project is when similar projects merge and leverage the best of each. But often a project owner loses interest or support and refers people to other open source projects.

It makes me happy to see all the stars and forks the SIGpi project has received to date. It keeps me thinking on what more I can do with the project that delivers the most value in ease of experimentation for SDR while minimizing efforts for end-users in building a platform that supports it. This is the goal as I begin development for SIGpi 7.0

Areas of improvement considered include:

• A better TUI menu system for installation and SIGpi package management.
• Documentation on the SIGpi package management system for end-users to add applications requiring compilation for using latest versions
• Continuous development/release rather than point release model
  
• Hardware Certification metrics for SIGpi
  

I hope this article serves as an inspiration for your own projects and helps with decision points in your own journey.

73,

Joe, NE2Z

 

SIGpi: The automated way to install SIGINT

 

If you are interested in signal interception (SIGINT) and the convergence of amateur radio with non-amateur radio wireless interests,  SIGpi might be worth a look.

What makes SIGpi different than DragonOS is that you can control what gets installed versus just running an image. The benefit of DragonOS is a much faster time from download to actual use compared to SIGpi, but that is ok.

Both projects have one thing in common, which is making it easier to enjoy the world of software defined radio and focusing on things not just on specific spectrum or applications.

How easy is this?

In the case of SIGpi, it is optimized to run on a Raspberry Pi and will compile all the correct dependencies to allow popular applications like SDRangel to run along with pre-configurations needed for different hardware SDR like the HackRF or Lime SDR among others.

Getting Started

As long as you are running a Raspberry Pi 4 and a fresh install of the latest Raspberry Pi OS or Ubuntu RPI,  here is all you need to do:

• Login as Pi (or ubuntu)
• Create a directory in your home called source and switch into it
• Clone the SIGpi repo
• Run SIGpi_installer.sh
• Follow script instructions.

To make things more clear, here are the steps you can simply copy and paste.

1. sudo apt-get install -y build-essential git
2. mkdir ~/source && cd ~/source
3. git clone https://github.com/joecupano/SIGpi.git
4. cd SIGpi
5. ./SIGpi_installer.sh

How long did you say this takes?

Even on the latest Raspberry Pi 4,  compiling software still can only happen as fast as it can happen. This is why Joe Cupano NE2Z chose to make an easy guided menu system to allow you to install only what you want and even give you time estimates for it to install. 

Aside from the default options already selected, you can further customize what else you wish to start with. Once you are done, now its time to hurry up and wait.

What is included in SIGpi?

The current list of included and validated software included in SIGpi can be found at https://github.com/joecupano/SIGpi.    It is worth mentioning that SIGpi was a necessity for a wider project called SIGbox which is covered separately. 

An example during the install script relating to different types of
radiosonde signals which can be decoded using appropriate
hardware, antenna and SIGpi. 

Open Hardware Summit 2018 Recap

This past week in Boston was the Open Hardware Summit on the beautiful campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

An estimated 340 people attended based on the number of filled seats for the great presentations that were scheduled across the day.

Alex Camilo and Michael Welling helped create this amazing open source design for an attendee name badge.
OSH Park and Screaming Circuits helped bring this into reality for OHS 2018

Beyond the 17 scheduled educational sessions at the MIT Stratton Student Center, there were also two separate areas for event sponsor demonstrations.

Open Hardware Summit 2018 Highlights

Every attendee received a keepsake "hackable" name tag that includes Wi-Fi connectivity for users to customize the E-Ink display, just like the ones found on the popular Amazon Kindle or in shelf edge displays at Kohl's department store.

More badge functionality can be accessed or enabled by built in FTP or serial connection thanks to the embedded MicroPython based programming along with some additional add on boards also provided to attendees of OHS2018. Other features include temperature sensing, different display fonts, color changing LED lights and SD card storage to name just a few.

The design files, firmware and more details are available on GitHub.  

Additionally, a bag full of goodies including a Particle.io Photon board, DigiKey ruler, stickers, notebooks and a number of other open source circuit projects were given to each attendee too.

Since a few members of HVDN were in attendance for the official event, here are our collective thoughts on the overall OHS2018 experience.

MIT Stratton Student Center was home to the 2018 Open Hardware Summit

Wednesday Evening Pre-OSHWA Networking & Attendee Swag Bag Assembly Gathering

Held at the premier "maker" space in Boston - Artisan's Asylum hosted tours of the member space and was also the backdrop for a pizza party to fuel the volunteers assisting with the assembly of swag bags for attendees of the next day official event.

Pictures of the pre-event have been withheld to protect the identities of all involved since adult beverages may have been also consumed along side the unique veggie crust pizza

The Artisan Asylum was not just home to electronic hobbyist "makers", but others interested
in all sorts of other design projects such as this rather interesting creation.
More about Artisan's Asylum can be found here

This casual gathering with a purpose was a great way to meet others involved in open source projects with pure hobby backgrounds or a blend of commercial and hobbyist areas of focus.

Thursday OSH2018  Event Sponsor Demo Highlights

There were two separate areas for event sponsors to setup demonstrations and talk with attendees of the event.  This staggered approach made it possible for all attendees to roam around the entire event rather than just stay put in one space.  Some of the sponsors that the HVDN team met with included:

• Autodesk  - Offered a sneak peak of Autodesk's EAGLE 9.2.0 software that offers the ability to:

• Import larger component databases from semiconductor manufacturers through vendors such as DigiKey, SparkFun and even more module based offerings.

• Easier ability to create custom components and pin-out labeling

• Enhanced trace and layout tools known as "FANOUT"

• New digital and analog testing tools 

A more detailed explanation and description of updates for version 9.2.0 can be found at http://eagle.autodesk.com/eagle/release-notes   

Many hobbyists seem to have adopted the open source KiCad software or the more simplistic virtual bread-boarding Fritzing program recently, but maybe EAGLE should be reevaluated again by some in the hobby community.

EAGLE is one of many CAD (Computer Assisted Design) programs for those
 interested in EDA (Elecronics Design Automation)

HVDN PERSPECTIVE: As a long time EAGLE user myself looking at alternatives in recent months, faith is now further restored in EAGLE (for now!!) as a commercial oriented program with a great freemium offering for hobbyists or students on a limited budget.

• Tindie.com - Nice discussion about how Tindie can help its sellers reach an audience looking to purchase or experience authentic products rather than foreign copied versions. 

Plus, how Tindie can help individual sellers better manage customer contact and support. Products such as the N5BOC duplex board that HVDN reviewed can be found on Tindie for example directly benefit by value offered by this online store which is part of SupplyFrame.

Ever wonder how much money gets spent by hobbyist "makers"? 
Here is a view into Japan only spending power. Please note this slide was provided by a
charismatic bunny ear wearing attendee of OSH2018 and is not related to Tindie.com

• Great Scott Gadgets - Fantastic discussion with the founder of this company (Michael Ossmann) behind products such as the HackRF One SDR platform, YardStick One and an exciting new product aimed at those looking for a peripheral expansion solution for I/O over USB called the GreatFET.

Learn more about the GreatFET by having a look
at the Great Scott Gadgets website.

Further discussion about other products such as sensor based products similar to the HVDN remote field strength project currently under redesign to accommodate a different Wi-Fi module. This to me was one of the highlights of the event in meeting Michael and talking "shop" about similar topics of interest.

• Red Hat - Handing out premium T-Shirts to those interested in Linux and IoT edge, core compute, or other open source related projects that can harness this robust operating system as an alternative to Microsoft Windows, Apple macOS or other Linux distributions such as Debian or Ubuntu.

Open Hardware Summit logo combines a few common electronic hobbyist components
to form an interesting design to promote the mission and focus of the open hardware community.
Learn more at https://www.oshwa.org/

• OSH Park - One of the best and US domestic provider of circuit board production services. Very valuable insight on working better with them for various projects and design tips to maximize hobbyist dollars. OSH Park is also known as the "purple board" guys, so that may give a hint as to whom HVDN is working with for some of its current and future projects.

Production space for the 300 attendee badges was made available at Artisan's Asylum.
Badges were being soldered the night before and programmed up until the last minute to make f
or a great personalized attendee experience.

Other sponsors there included hackster.io,  MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering,  Circuit Maker and Upverter by Altium, OpenBCI, Digilent, ICFOSS, ShopBot, ChibiTronics  and OctoPart but did not have the time to engage in deeper discussion with them.

Of the scheduled presentations, here is a review of  just a few of them:

• Sara Chipps: C++ API for Kids

Sara provided an excellent overview on how to encourage and inspire children and people of all ages that its never to early (or late) to learn how to code and enable all sorts of projects or dreams. Her company, JewelBots demonstrates the convergence of science, technology, engineering and math also known as STEM.  This is outside of her day job at Stack Overflow.

• Robin Getz: Open Source Software Defined Radio

Robin works for Analog Devices and provided a great basic understanding of what is software defined radio, its impact on the future of RF design and its ADALM-PLUTO evaluation platform available for purchase through ADI directly or re-sellers such DigiKey. 

ADALM-PLUTO SDR development board offered by Analog Devices

• Neil Gershenfeld: How To Make (almost) Anything

Prof. Gershenfeld is director of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms and covered the future of manufacturing through the lens of Moores Law limitations, self replicating machines and the third digital revolution. It was a fascinating presentation that generated many questions from the audience and three rounds of applause.

The ubiquity of compute enabled devices highlight the amount of underlying impact
technology has on our expanding global economy

• Joseph Apuzzo: MicroPython on ESP32 and LoBo

HVDN's own Joe Apuzzo (N1JTA) had the dubious task of following Neil's presentation and covered the convergence of amateur radio, embedded operating systems and low cost STM32 based micro-controller hardware that can offer high relative performance. 

Particle.io comparison. The Photon, Electron and soon to be available Argon, Boron
and Xenon boards all support microPython and area all very low cost.

Various applications such as MMDVM or IoT through the easy to adopt programming language known as microPython and its performance enhanced graphical interface system known as LoBo can take advantage of both open source hardware and software.   

• Jodi Clark: OpenCosplay, Teaching the Next Generation

Jodi took the audience on a journey through her progression of a hobby interest that turned into a life changing series events that ultimately unlocked a tremendous career opportunity.  CosPlay is the hobby of designing detailed costumes or props found in cartoons, anime, comic books and more that are as realistic as possible.  

While many costumers understand how to create amazing things out of fabric and other materials, many do not know how to integrate electronics to create even better costume experiences.  

Jodi has a popular YouTube channel that teaches some of this and a video of her presentation can be found here

• Nathan Seidle: Founder of Spark Fun (Secret Surprise Speaker)

Nathan was the surprise speaker of the 2018 Open Hardware Summit and shared some recent projects that leveraged or improved upon open source projects.  Nathan first shared how the SparkFun team was able to 3D print different components that formed part of a "safe cracking" robot. 

He then went on to later share in detail how a community of hobbyists helped improve on a machine used in the rapid production of circuit board assembly.  

Sparkfun offers a range of kits, boards, modules and project ideas for
the modern electronic hobbyist and education community

The company Nathan founded has proved a valuable contributor to the hobbyist community over the years and his presentation certainly was exciting to be present for.

• Ted Hayes: How to Put A Neural Network on an Arduino and Why

The topic that Ted covered rivaled the big picture thinking and complexity explored in Neil Gershenfeld's earlier discussion. The Arduino is a capable low cost embedded computing option available today to hobbyists.  

Neural networks partially involve a non-binary state of computing that unlocks amazing potential on low cost hardware, just like what Joe Appuzo covered in his microPython presentation. A more detailed article about neural networks can be found here and a recording of Ted's presentation hopefully will hopefully be made available through OSHWA soon, because I really want to go back and watch it.

• Closing Remarks: Alicia Gibb, OSHWA Director

Alicia thanked so many people who made this event possible and let the audience know that the 2019 Open Source Hardware Summit will likely be in China next year.  HVDN may be organizing a group rate trip for those potentially interested in attending, so please sign up for updates or inquire if there is interest through our various contact forms.

Why Open Hardware Summit & HVDN relate to each other?

Perhaps it would have made sense to explain about what the open hardware movement is all about first before a review of the event, but now I know I have your attention from all the excitement covered above.

Open source design has proven to disrupt and innovate in the data center.
The amateur radio community may be able to innovate by looking at how the open source
hardware movement has already impacted other communication technologies

Within the amateur radio community, there have been heated debates about copying the design of freely available designs for projects such as the ZUMspot.   This is where the opensource overlay into ham radio comes into focus.

This hotspot device was hard to get at times and priced at a level that not everyone could afford for a niche interest.  

These contributed to a friction full experience that hindered adoption and innovation, but at the same time created a competitive opportunity.

Once a few hobbyists copied the original design for this digital hot spot and offered them for sale at more than a 50% price reduction thanks to cheap off shore manufacturing, an entire new market was created that drove additional interest in MMDVM based hotspot purchases thanks to slightly less purchase friction.

Will this new project called "Faraday" be the future of amateur radio?
Learn more here at: https://faradayrf.com/

Additional components for the copycat versions of the original ZUMspot were now high in demand such as cases, power supplies, better antennas, displays and even oscillators!

This never would have happened had there not been open source hotspot hardware available alongside its opensource software needed to create an interesting piece of communication equipment.

Copy of the original ZUMspot version that Joe N1JTA offered some tips for in the
"MMDVM JumboSPOT board: Mods you may need" article.

Amateur radio operators that had experimented with low cost DMR radios such as the TYT MD-380 or Radioddity GD-77 that did not have local repeaters to communicated with others through now had something entirely new to experiment with thanks to this open source derived experience.

The ZUMspot sparked additional purchases and areas of interest due to its open source
design and the competitive opportunities it created

Open source projects have created tremendous amounts of spending that would not have otherwise happened without this contribution to the hobby.

There is a huge opportunity for the amateur radio community to look towards other hobbyist communities in order to bring expertise they do not have related to licensed wireless communication capability.

Open Hardware Summit showcased so much synergy potential for the renewed relevancy of amateur radio outside of what some most associate with amateur radio.

HVDN wants to help promote experimentation through open source hardware, so please use the search cloud on the HVDN Notebook to find other articles tagged with Open Source Hardware in the future.

Feel free to share some links to your favorite blogs, project pages, re-sellers, etc related to open source hardware.