[hpsdr] The "Big Boys" Arrive at HPSDR

[Steve Bunch]

Larry,

On Oct 20, 2010, at 9:49 PM, Larry Gadallah wrote:

> ***** High Performance Software Defined Radio Discussion List *****
> 
> It would be interesting to know what kind of prices GE is charging for
> what looks a lot like a knock-off of the HPSDR family:
> 
> http://www.ge-ip.com/products/family/software-defined-radio

Well, not exactly.  In 1996, several industry players (I worked at one of them) got together and formed the SDR Forum, a trade group to create interest and standards around SDR.  It's been renamed, and you can visit their website at http://www.wirelessinnovation.org/  The SDR's of those days were a chassis full of boards, and at least one of them I know of that was built in response to a government RFP used CORBA to control and communicate among the boards, with separate data paths moving samples from board to board.  If you look through the literature of the period, you'll find a lot of reference to "waveforms", which was a shorthand term for the modulation and protocol to be used for a communication.  I'll just say that not all of these were CW, AM, and SSB, and leave it at that ;-).

There have been experimental (government-funded, mostly) SDR receivers and transmitters built in component (board) form since the 1990's, though the technology has gotten better and better, and cheaper and cheaper.  Someone who was in the middle of this can probably add detail, but it was big-bucks USDoD money paying for the development of high-resolution ADC's and DAC's in those days, and the prices for those chips and radios, with much less precision than today's HPSDR boards, was staggering by HPSDR standards.  Cutbacks in military funding pushed a lot of really good RF and chip designers into commercial IC companies, and the result over the last decade or so has been to rapidly advance formerly prohibitively-expensive SDR technology (along with RF chip design) into commodity chips and down in price to the point that we can all afford it.

I'm not familiar with the GE boards you found, but my guess is that if you have to ask the price, you probably can't afford them ;-).

73,
Steve, K9SRB 

> 73,
> -- 
> Larry Gadallah, VE6VQ/W7                          lgadallah AT gmail DOT com
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