There has been a mode that has been growing quietly behind the scenes. It’s been led by the FreeDV group for the most part. Some say it will surpass and take over SSB (AM) shortly, and it is called RADE or Radio Autoencoder, with promises of a more natural human voice. The audio clarity is quite impressive, eliminating most of the background noise by the use of filtering and AI. So much attention that the ARRL has even noticed it in a recent article.
As an indicator that the mode is taking hold we can can see that radio manufacturers are starting to implement it. For example, some Flex Radio models are now supporting the mode. For the rest of the world (those who can not afford Flex Radio) RADE can be added to any HF transceiver by simply connecting it to a computer and running the lightweight software.
The research as mentioned is being led by FreeDV and is in part being funded by Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC). Despite the major advances that FreeDV has made with RADE, they have not stopped. They are pushing their research and testing by focusing now on RADE V2. and are calling for volunteer testers for real-time, over-the-air, push-to-talk (PTT) testing using their software.
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