Hello Mike OE3DMB and Andreas OE3MZC,
Many thanks for your positive feedback. These kind of open and hassle-free discussions are very welcome,
After some internal and external discussions, I'm not really thinking that LoRa is fully legal, but probably more in a “tolerated grey zone”:
ITU-RR and so the local authorities clearly demand “open language” in the amateur-radio and amateur-satellite service, which is to be translated as “open modulation and open protocols” in modern digital modes by means of publicly available documents and descriptions. Furthermore, “encoding” (not to talk about encryption) as a sort of obfuscation is not allowed in our amateur radio services.
When AMSAT first introduced the 400 Bit/s BPSK telemetry on the P3-satellites, it was required to publish all details (modulation, protocols, etc.) beforehand in public, for example widely available amateur radio magazines. Otherwise I would probably never became interested in amateur radio satellites and AMSAT, when my brother and myself build our own hardware and software to decode the telemetry from OSCAR-10.
OK, we can buy the LoRa chip...
LoRa is using proprietary encoding in the physical layer. Would LoRa be “patented” it would be openly documented, but they would disclose their intellectual property than. Only protected by patents, others could copy or modify it. Expensive and lengthy patent lawsuits would be the result. Sometimes it is easier and cheaper to keep these details secret instead, as with LoRa. So they indeed use some kind of "obfuscation" directly in the physical layer (modulation) to deal with this business model.
I think it’s not even good to argue with D-STAR and the questionable AMBE Vocoder. When I was looking for more information, for example on Wikipedia, there is a lot of criticism and commercial fighting involved. AMBE is obviously patented and everyone who wanted to use it had to pay a high license fee for it, as part of the silicone price. In 2017 the patents have expired, obviously opening the doors for free open source software solutions probably ending these endless discussions…
Maybe a good compromise is to argue that the LoRa-Chips are widely available at reasonable price and not limited to closed user groups.
Anyhow, I'm not against LoRa.. the opposite is true.. But before using it, I wanted to to better understand the legality of it..
But I have to confess, there is no black or white.. it's in the grey
On the other hand, it's an very interesting technology to play with and evaluate.. and that's also the purpose of our hobby...
73s Peter