[DSP-10] EZKit-Lite

[Bdale Garbee]

Donn.Baker@UNISYS.com (Baker, Donn B) writes:

> One thing to consider is that if you do that, you tie up a reasonably large,
> expensive, and power-hungry Pentium box.

They're cheap, actually.  Nice Pentium notebook PC's are well below $500 used.
Check eBay, or www.usedlaptops.com.  Lots more versatility per $ than a 
standalone DSP board.  I'm a fairly serious UHF/Microwave rover (a couple of 
divisional record scores in the August ARRL contest, for example), and I don't
see a problem.  If I've got to carry a laptop anyway, I'd rather make it a
slightly more capable laptop and not have to pay for and deal with the DSP
board.  

> A second issue may be that there are many flavors of "sound card."

Irrelevant if you're using a reasonable API for your programming.  I suspect
Windows provides a suitable interface, I know Linux does.  Difficulty dealing
with sound card funnies was a big deal in DOS days, it's pretty much history
now.

> Distributed processing DOES have a place in the world, and this is one of
> them.

I disagree, but that's cool.  It's a hobby, so we don't actually have to 
convince each other to carry on and do cool things...  :-)

73 - Bdale, KB0G