[Premium-Rx] A Policy Question

[Sig346 at netscape.net]

The answer is definitely NO. In every language a premium receiver
refers to performance, not to klickability. I own the SDR-14 and
I am satisfied with it, for some application it is the only alternative
to, say Rockwell Collins CX-7800 at 5% price of the latter. Strictly
speaking it is NOT A RECEIVER, it is a specialty AD converter
combined with digital signal processing. And the developers of the
SDR-14 do not insist it is a receiver in a common sense. All other
SDR on the market are like SDR-14 in performance. 

Every new generation of engineers and scientists is eager to have
something to say, so they invent definitions and wordings if they
cannot invent new technology. Software defined radios are good
example. This name came around 1998 - 1999. At this time there
was an excellent receiver from Rockwell Collins, 95S-1A with direct
conversion, quadrature digitalization of the baseband signal
and all filtering and demodulation by software. I was in contact
with Rockwell Collins when the receiver was in development I never
heard wordings like software defined radio albeit 95S-1A was in
every respect SDR. I stress it was SDR, not merely AD. The folks
who introduced the term SDR realised that would be the only way
to camouflage that they were doing  what others had done years ago.

Again, I used SDR-14 in my projects and am very impressed with
it as a building block. I tried practically any other SDRs available on the market.
They are similar to SDR-14, some of them are not truly software defined
but software controlled (it is not the same: it would be not
difficult to make good old R390 software controlled if someone
builds an electromechanical interface).

Anyway, SDR like SDR-14 is a perfect building block for a really
top performance receiver or signal acquisition system. Rockwell
Collins and TCI use similar modules in their surveillance,
signal classification and modulation analysis systems. But converting
an SDR to a premium reciver requires a premium radio frequency
engineer.

Regards
A.W. 


Larry Gadallah <lgadallah at gmail.com> wrote:

>Oh learned founders of Premium-RX:
>
>What with the advent of all sorts of geekish-whizbang software radios like
>the SDR-1000 <http://www.flex-radio.com/index.htm>,
>SDR-14 <http://www.rfspace.com/sdr14.html>, and doubtless many others to
>come a question arises: Do any of these qualify as a premium RX?
>
>What if you upgrade the software? Does it then become possible to do a
>non-premium->premium upgrade? Can we define some guidelines to differentiate
>a consumer-grade SDR from a premium SDR? How about the sample rate, or maybe
>the bits/sample?
>
>73,
>--
>Larry Gadallah,
>lgadallah AT gmail DOT com
>

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