
Anyone who has turned on a shortwave radio in the past decade knows it's a wasteland out there, to the chagrin of nostalgic old geeks like me. But
this technology sector is also one poised to explode with innovation thanks to software-defined radio. From H-Online: "Software-defined radio promises to [make] the complexity in radio systems a software problem. The principle is simple and, in the ideal setup, an antenna is connected directly to analogue-to-digital converters for receiving signals and digital-to-analogue converters for transmitting them, with software running on an attached processor taking care of everything else." Your computer is about to become more useful than ever.
Member since:
2005-07-08
When I read about Software Defined Radio, it is always in the context of military. Cell phones are already probably software defined to some extent except the various standards make them pretty well frozen for each generation. Its the job of the system engineer to select which DSP blocks go into hardware or software to meet the current specs.
Looks like the picture of the GNU radio is FPGA driven too, Verilog based, looks quite interesting.
And the RTL2832U is a cheap way of getting some of that capability for low end.
This getting way out of the normal coverage of OSNews?