I concurrently concur. The Emporer has no clothes- you need PC oomph to use
all the sampling, with low latency buffers, and third party software for
logging and equipment control. I wanted more oomph after PSDR 2 came out with
its pretty skins of molasses. Then I needed more oomph when I added RX2. I
know that many people can enjoy their $3,500 radio with a $500 PC. But I look
outside at my antennae, and figure my PC should at least cost more than my
feedlines. And the side benefit is that I can play Battlefield 3 when the
propagation dies.
> Date: Sun, 4 Dec 2011 13:23:02 -0500
> From: [email protected]
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: [FlexEdge] (no subject)
>
> I admit it right up front. I have a bad-ass computer. Beginning with my
> Altair (anybody remember those?) and working forward, I've always built my
> own computers, with the exception of my last one, which I bought in a
> moment of temporary insanity. It was a game-but-lame little Gateway with a
> Core Duo processor and 2GB of RAM. Now that is gone and I'm typing this on
> a homebuilt AMD Phenom II 6-core with 16GB of RAM, a wicked fast graphics
> card, a nice solid-state drive, and all the trimmings.
>
> The cost for all this luxury? A thousand bucks and change. Much less than
> most people think, a little more than half the price of a 3000. Two hours
> of my time to assemble it, another two hours to install the OS, reload the
> apps, and move over the data.
>
> What's my point? Well, I made the remark a few days ago that a good radio
> needs a good computer. Ever since, people have been chiming in to report
> that they have old or small computers that run PSDR just fine. "The
> latency is short enough that I've gotten used to it and it mostly doesn't
> bother me," said one of our faithful, who took me to task in a private
> email for being a computer snob.
>
> Although someone will probably chime in to say that they are able to run
> PSDR with a germanium crystal, a cat's hair, a bobby pin, and two rubber
> bands, we continue to hear all the little bits of guidance: You'll need to
> run GBoost...run Autorun...turn off services...get a registry optimizer...
>
> I appreciate that some folks (like me!) are workin' stiffs without a lot of
> extra cash. But we all saved up for our Flex radios and we can all save up
> for good computers. And then we won't need GBoost or Autorun or PC
> Optimizer. We won't need one computer to run the radio and another to do
> everything else. We won't have to worry about latencies or CPU usage. We
> can just play in the radio sandbox.
>
> A good radio needs a good computer.
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This is the FlexRadio Systems e-mail Reflector called FlexEdge. It is used for
posting topics related to SDR software development and experimentalist who are
using beta versions of the software.
