[Elecraft] K3 & ADAT ADT-200A by HB9CBU

[Philip Covington]

On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 1:54 PM, Julian, G4ILO <julian.g4ilo at gmail.com> wrote:

> I was really more concerned with what support there will be for the current
> generation of SDR radios in, say 10 years time. If the PC that runs the
> current software dies, and you can't get a new PC that runs XP (or whatever
> you need to run that SDR software) what guarantee do you have that any
> software that runs on Windows 2020 or whatever will support the 10 year old
> box. The manufacturer (if they are still around) will probably have no
> interest in supporting obsolete products.

This is one of the arguments in favor of the open source model.  If
the manufacturer of hardware that uses proprietary software/firmware
goes away, you are pretty much stuck with whatever the last release
was before the manufacturer went belly up.  If the software/firmware
is open source, the hardware can still be supported long after the
manufacturer has gone.  Of course if you can't do the
software/firmware yourself, it is a little less convincing argument at
face value but you always still have the option to pay or barter for a
software developer to make the changes or fix the bugs that you want.

With interfaces such as USB (the new upcoming USB 3.0 is backwards
compatible with USB 2.0 and USB 1.1) or Ethernet, support for those
interfaces in the PCs should be around through multiple versions of
Windows/Linux/OS?.

73 Phil N8VB

-- 
Phil Covington
Software Radio Laboratory LLC
Columbus, Ohio
http://www.srl-llc.com