On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 1:14 AM, Adam Nielsen <[email protected]> wrote: > > To be fair, SDR on PCs is still a field in its infancy. We have only > had affordable devices that can do SDR for a couple of years now, which > is only just opening up the field to increasing numbers of people.
Hi Adam, While it is true that there has been a significant boost in the area of PC-based SDR hardware and software over the last few years, the technology has existed and been practiced for as I remember. I have run my first soundcard based SDR on a DOS PC in the mid 1990's. Others have built their own ADC/DAC boards to plug into an ISA slot in the PC even before that. Of course, it was nothing like SDR is today and most of the software from then is neither available nor particularly usable today. However, according to Wikipedia even GNU Radio has been around since 2001 and it was born as a fork of an already existing project. If I should guess why there aren't so many mature SDR applications out there I would say that it is because SDR spans over so many engineering disciplines. Writing a good SDR application requires understanding of RF, analog, digital, DSP and last but not least, software engineering. Yeah, it's a life long learning. Alex
