Hello John!
An Achilles heel of some SDR's been software longevity and stability,
with some folks driven away from otherwise excellent radios due to
system crashes and other quirks. Since at least one (think
domestic)manufacturer has had significant user issues with their SDR, it
would be interesting to hear from someone on the design team who could
comment on the K3's software architecture and what longevity/stability
testing has been done to date.
Unlike PC based radios, which share the signal processing computer with
all sorts of applications, the K3 uses embedded processors for all logic
and processing. As a result, we have control over what the DSP and
control processors are doing in the radio. This in itself promotes
stability.
Wayne and I are not co-located. He is in Silicon Valley; I'm north of
Seattle. He writes the code for the control processor while I write the
code for the DSP. As you can imagine, the fibers have been lit with
code releases flying back and forth as we've been developing the radio
over the last three years, and especially during the last two years as
we've been running prototype hardware and refining the design.
Like most companies, we have developers and we have testing done by
others who are not writing the code. We identify a problem -- maybe a
bug, maybe the next feature on the list that needs to be implemented --
go off into our corners and work out a solution, test it among
ourselves, then expose it to the larger test community. When we're all
satisfied, it goes into the release area.
We want the K3 to be dynamic and exciting. We hope to release not only
incremental improvements to existing features, but added features from
time time. Just like the K3 itself was a surprise to many, if not all,
of you, some of the new features will also be a (pleasant!) surprise.
73,
Lyle KK7P
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