And sound card MODEMS have preceded the sound card SDR by an easy decade and
more. I did a Morse decoder back in the mid 70s on a Processor Technology SOL PC
board. And I was not the first. I used ideas written up by somebody else.
On the other paw, a lot of the potential for SDRs is still unrealized. And a lot
of pitfalls on the analog side of the picture are still being filled in. (A
small software thinko can generate impressively wide bands of annoying noise for
others. FSK without shaping the envelope at least a little is WIDE.)
{^_^} Joanne
On 2014-09-17 03:09, Alexandru Csete wrote:
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
