[Elecraft] K3 is an SDR?

[John Lawrence]

 Don

As I'd expect, you did a beautiful job summarizing the difference between the K3 and KX3 
design architecture.  

I'd call the K3 a hybrid SDR and the KX3 a true SDR?

What's interesting to me comes from looking at the leap forward in component technology to make
direct SDR from RF possible.  This is the evolution in the chip level devices it takes to gain this single step conversion
to baseband.  Faster and more agile DSP, A/D and D/A etc ICs are at the heart of the step forward
between the K3 and KX3.  

The companies producing these chips were at my fingertips back in the days 10 to 20 years ago. Then they were only able
to make it to lower frequency IF stages with costly designs only found in the top high tech applications such as those found in government surveillance.  

Back then Burr Brown, Analog Devices, Texas Instruments, Motorola, Lucent/Bell Labs were working hard with competitive designs.  Semiconductor foundry geometries were heading for half micron on 4" or 6" silicon back then.  

The software development tools allowing greater coding efficiencies is another area that has played a major roll to bring us to this point.  

And, his was all done within our free enterprise environment by private/public capitalized US businesses.



Happy Holidays


 


John, W1QS

 
Waldoboro, Maine