The AMBE-3000 vocoder chip (used for pretty much all of the digital modes, including D-STAR and DMR) retails for about $50, before volume discount.
Which is not a small mount of money, but isn't that bad given that most amateur radios (excluding the recent Chinese models) retail for ~$500, and commercial radios retail for $1,000+.
That said, I'm pretty sure everyone would prefer to move to Codec2, but the lack of hardware offerings is a problem. I'm looking forward to the day the first real SDR handheld transceiver comes out so this can be implemented by the open source radio community. It's clear that none of the radio manufacturers are interested in interoperability, much less adopting community standards.
Which is not a small mount of money, but isn't that bad given that most amateur radios (excluding the recent Chinese models) retail for ~$500, and commercial radios retail for $1,000+.
That said, I'm pretty sure everyone would prefer to move to Codec2, but the lack of hardware offerings is a problem. I'm looking forward to the day the first real SDR handheld transceiver comes out so this can be implemented by the open source radio community. It's clear that none of the radio manufacturers are interested in interoperability, much less adopting community standards.