
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:
2008-03-17
Also it is massively power hungry ATM, limiting its use to base-stations or devices with big batteries.
One should also note the difficulties in transmitting and receiving in the whole spectrum. If one plans to convert RF directly to digital baseband, you going to need beastly ADCs and DACs (among many other issues).
Edited 2013-01-11 00:06 UTC