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Linux Powers First Handheld Software Radio
An anonymous reader writes "According to this article at LinuxDevices.com, Vanu Technology is demonstrating what it claims represents the world's first handheld 'software radio' using an iPAQ PDA running Linux at a conference in Washington DC today. Vanu apparently has implemented the signal processing functions on the iPAQ's XScale processor, and their software uses POSIX APIs to make it platform independent. Software radios implement multiple radio standards and frequency bands in software, rather than hardware. A standard iPAQ expansion pack houses the radio transceiver."
Holy cheeses, man, who the hell wants to listen to a $5 transistor radio when you can hear the same thing on $1500 worth of uber-geek gear?
The possibilities for software radio are mind boggling.
And the short length of time your batteries will last will boggle the mind even more. Using a general purpose CPU to do all of that comm stuff would use many times more power then dedicated ASIC's. To find out how much this would suck, insert an 802.11b card into the PC Card sleeve on an iPaq, do a constant ping, and run an app that utilized 100% cpu.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.