[hpsdr] Call for Comments and Discussion - OzyII

[Larry Gadallah]

2009/7/21 Paul Cecil <bikerpaul at suscom-maine.net>:
> As I said there are a lot of great ideas being voiced but I am afraid that
> OZY II will become infected with "bloat", and the attempt will be made to
> make it a do everything card. If we make it too complex then that can delay
> its release, and in the end make it too expensive. And with that thought we
> need to keep this in mind. If we want to see more people involved with HPSDR
> then we will need to watch our costs. We have all seen the "HPSDR boards for
> sale" ads that have popped up. And a number have admitted the additional
> expense to complete the HPSDR to a usable radio was one of the factors. Just
> something else to think about.
>
> Lets keep OZY II simple!
>

I also agree with Paul. There is a famous quote somewhere that goes
something like "simplicity is the ultimate sophistication...". In my
humble opinion, a significant detraction from many of the currently
shipping SDRs is the heavy reliance on a stack of (sometimes unstable)
USB hardware and software. If there is a faster, cleaner way to get
data from the ADC/CIC into a user's computer where the interesting
processing is going to happen, I'm all for it. I also suspect that the
more complex the FPGA code and logic becomes, the less likely people
are going to understand it and modify and innovate with it.

I concur with all of the comments about being able to "remote" the
receiver "head" using Ethernet, and it is indeed much more flexible to
be able to do a bunch of TCP/IP plumbing to route data here and there,
but I don't think the TCP/IP stack needs to be in the radio itself.
The radio can communicate with the host computer using Ethernet MAC
frames, and the host computer can talk to the rest of the world via
TCP/IP (on a separate interface if need be). Computing appliances of
every kind that speak TCP/IP are now ubiquitous and cheap, and
available in any imaginable format. We don't need to re-invent another
one here.

We would do well to remember the time-tested UNIX philosophy for
partitioning work amongst modules: Do only one thing, and do it well.

Cheers,
-- 
Larry Gadallah, VE6VQ/W7                          lgadallah AT gmail DOT com
PGP Sig: 917E DDB7 C911 9EC1 0CD9  C06B 06C4 835F 0BB8 7336

 1248241979.0