This year’s Friedrichshafen booth was busier than ever, with noticeably higher visitor traffic than last year. Many visitors encountered M17 and the wider open-source amateur radio ecosystem for the first time. The Nokia 3310 demonstration running OpenRTX+libm17 proved to be an excellent conversation starter, while the LinHT display allowed visitors to explore the project’s evolution and preview the upcoming Revision C hardware.

Throughout the event, we answered countless questions about LinHT and discussed why open hardware and open protocols matter in amateur radio. We often compared LinHT and M17 to Linux: unlike proprietary digital voice systems and commercial radios, they give users complete insight into (and control over) the technology they use. This is especially significant when one wants to use this technology for education purposes – the code and hardware can be inspected and analyzed by anyone. Many visitors were particularly interested in the possibility of running an open-source TETRA RF stack on our hardware, especially the SX1255 full-duplex hotspot.

We were also pleased to share the exhibition hall with our long-time neighbors from OpenRTX, continuing the strong collaboration within the open-source amateur radio community.

Another highlight of the event was being interviewed by a prominent amateur radio journalist Tobias DL3MHT (a co-host of The European Ham Radio Show). During the interview, we discussed the ongoing development of LinHT, its role within the M17 ecosystem, and our vision for open hardware in amateur radio.

We also had the opportunity to meet Vivian Xu, BI6KSS, from Retevis in person after nearly five years of corresponding by email. Although the language barrier made detailed technical discussions challenging, it was a pleasure to finally put a face to the name. We hope this meeting will strengthen our collaboration and eventually lead to Retevis sharing the schematics for some of their new radio models with us, which would be a valuable step toward supporting their gear within the OpenRTX/M17 open-source ecosystem.

We were delighted to meet so many people interested in our work. If you’d like to help us continue developing open hardware and open-source amateur radio technologies such as LinHT and M17, while also making our visit to Friedrichshafen next year possible, please consider supporting the foundation with a donation.