Top posting feels all wrong ;-) Forget Firewire for this. Firewire is admittedly very good but it's far from standard on non-apple products and USB3 is going to give it a good run for it's money in all areas except perhaps Pro A/V where latency is a huge concern.
However the real issue with both firewire and USB is the need it then creates for the Vendor (elecraft in this case) to maintain drivers for various versions of popular operating systems for the life of the product (& what happens to those drivers when the product becomes EOL) . I have an SDR-14 and I can transfer up to a 190KHz slice of the HF spectrum via USBv1. How much bandwidth is really required ? (Main RX / Sub RX + I/Q of the 12KHz IF + Rig control ? ) A much better solution would be Ethernet and IP based protocols. it's also a lot more flexible in that the connection to the radio can be routed over any network providing sufficient bandwidth is available. This also avoids the need to maintain a set of high quality drivers for a diverse and ever changing range of operating systems. 100M Ethernet should be sufficient but by all means use a Gigbit port, it will only add a small amount to the overall cost. Use a little tiny embedded computer to run the IP stack and there could even be a web server in there allowing for remote rig control, Audio I/O etc without needing to use anything fancier than a Flash capable web browser. Embedded computers are getting very small and very capable, take a look at this one for example . http://www.directinsight.co.uk/products/karo/triton-tx51-imx51.html 73 Brendan EI6IZ On Sat, 2009-12-05 at 21:59 -0500, p...@n4lcd.com wrote: > Just thinking out loud into the future.... > > Firewire can do a lot of things that USB and serial communications never will. > > It's faster with video and disk I/O because the protocol is leaner, > and you can create networks with it. > > I think that a FireWire network between a rig like the K3 and a > computer would be the perfect interface because every piece of > software can have its own dedicated connection to the radio, > something difficult to implement with a serial connection. > > Firewire will also stay around because it's used as the Fly-by-wire > bus for the F-22 Raptor. > > Any thoughts? > > Paul N4LCD > > ______________________________________________________________ > Elecraft mailing list > Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft > Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm > Post: mailto:Elecraft@mailman.qth.net > > This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net > Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html -- 73 Brendan EI6IZ ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:Elecraft@mailman.qth.net This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
