[Premium-Rx] A Policy Question

[Peter Gottlieb]

"converting an SDR to a premium reciver requires a premium radio frequency
engineer."

As an engineer this makes me laugh.  Can I put on my resume that I am a 
"premium" engineer?  How does one quantize that?  At what boundary does an 
engineer become premium?  And does that make them bonus-eligible?

Is my Harris RF-590A receiver "premium?"  It is microprocessor controlled.  How 
about the Collins HF-1000 series with their DSPs?  How about the Watkins-Johnson 
  HF units?  Now what happens if you take the remotable WJ receiver/front panel 
and you replace the remote (receiver) box with a SDR which emulates the original 
WJ specs?  If it is in a black box and you cannot tell which is the WJ and which 
is the SDR, what do you do now?  After all, all a receiver really is is a box 
with an input and an output with a mathematical transfer function.

So, is it the front panel?  Is it the internal technology?  Is it the status of 
the name of the manufacturer?  Is it the intended use?  Or intended customer? 
Or what?

Peter




Sig346 at netscape.net wrote:
> 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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