[Elecraft] Different focus

[Bill Frantz]

IEEE Binary Floating Point assumes (except in case of a very 
small, de-normalized number), that the high order bit of the 
mantissa is a one. With this assumption, it doesn't need to 
actually represent the one in memory. So, it has 8 bits of 
exponent, 1 bit of sign, and 24 bits of mantissa crammed into 32 
bits. It should be able to handle the full precision of a 24 bit 
AtoD converter.

73 Bill AE6JV

On 1/25/21 at 8:15 AM, aa4lr at arrl.net (Bill Coleman) wrote:

>
>>On Jan 24, 2021, at 1:33 PM, Wayne Burdick <n6kr at elecraft.com> wrote:
>>
>>> (Or did we have some other definition of “higher-performance”?)
>>
>>Yes: More bits than 16, more monotonicity in the LSBs, general improvement in SFDR, or lower
>internal noise.
>>
>>Adding more ADC bits does not require more DSP horsepower. The DSP is 32 bit floating point.
>
>Well, that works up to 23-bits! (FP numbers have a 23-bit mantissa)

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