On Wed, 23 Jan 2002 18:06:17 -0600
"George, W5YR" <w5yr@att.net> wrote:
> The notion that a software radio is forever with only occasional
> software upgrades is a pleasant one but one whose time has not yet
> arrived - unless the ORION is a *real* surprise!
>
If you've got the cash (LOTS of cash) you can buy one today from
Rockwell-Collins. They have a model that is essentially an RF amp
followed by an A/D followed by a custom DSP. You could buy several ORION
and OMNI units for the price of one of those puppies, though :-)
While I will grant that the current crop of commercial
"software-defined" radios are only partially "there" in that everything
up to the (low) last IF stage is conventional analog radio but the last
IF, filters, detector, (some of) the AGC, the audio processing et. al.
*are* truly "software-defined" in the DSP. SM5BSZ has a receiver he uses
for EME, MS and other weak-signal work that consists of an RF amp (for
the noise figure), an image-free mixer very much like KK7B's R2 and a
hot-rod PC sound card. Everything is done in software on the PC (under
Linux) but could just as easily be done in a dedicated DSP. George, the
ORION could easily be similar to that!
More info on the Linrad project (SM5BSZ) at
http://ham.te.hik.se/~sm5bsz/linuxdsp/linrad.htm--
Bill Meahan WA8TZG wmeahan@wa8tzg.org
"Always do right. This will gratify some people
and astonish the rest." -- Mark Twain
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