[Premium-Rx] A Policy Question

[Steve Stutman]

Observable reality would suggest that Premium Rxs have, in general, one 
or more of the following attributes:

1. No longer supported by manufacturer; mfg no longer extant.

2. Documentation which is sparse or not quite correct.

3. Parts which are unobtainium or at least costly.

4. One or more deficient sub-systems or components.

5. Contrarian design philosophies.

6. Hard to find and/or expensive to purchase.

7. An area of performance or I/F which is outstanding, or at least    novel.

8. Operational character which is antithetical to contemporary consumer 
gear.

9. Metal castings.

10.Nice to look at in dim light; yes I know the other joke.

11.People who appreciate their various qualities and are quite 
passionate about them.

Corollary: Osterman's book has cost me more than any other modern book.

73,
Steve











Peter Gottlieb wrote:

> "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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>>
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>>
>>
> 
> _______________________________________________
> 
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> Visit the Website: http://kahuna.sdsu.edu/~mechtron/PremRxPage/