[Elecraft] [OT] Dayton- new hf rigs?

[Tony Estep]

On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 12:30 PM, <wb4jfi at knology.net> wrote:

> ... I'm not sure that a honking computer is required...

=======
Naw, the client that displays the pan and controls the radio appears to be
not too different from, say, Ham Radio Deluxe. Of course you can run lots
of pans at once and increase the computing needed, but the radio part is
all on the ARM chip inside.

This is an interesting gambit on Flex's part. They absolutely have to get
out from under PSDR, which has been a huge resource drain with no
offsetting revenues. And they were facing obsolescence problems: a new
version of Firewire, USB 3.0, new Windows OS, etc were making them run hard
to stay in the same place with the old designs. OTOH, leaving the old
designs and their installed user base in the dust kinda makes the claim
that the radio can never go out of style sound a bit hollow -- their old
designs are now orphans and that situation will only get worse. An HQ-110
still performs as it did 50 years ago, but a radio that depended on an
Atari 400 or an Apple 1 would just be junk. That could be the eventual fate
of the existing Flex radios, and this new design makes that point in a
trenchant way. It's a very promising design, a huge upgrade, and a huge
amount of addition by subtraction; but it illustrates the difficulties and
dangers of SDR as a business plan.

Tony KT0NY

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