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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."
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This looks really cool, but it seems that the cost will be prohibitive for people who just want to listen to the radio. As the article mentions, the ability to operate on many different formats is probably more geared towards industry uses. Oh, and of course it will save lives because emergency response teams will be able to communicate better ;)
You really don't want to try to get AM inside a computer. It's so full of nasty EMI you'll just get a head full of static and pops and buzzes.
Bah! Sheilding is very very easy. How many people here have PCI TV-Tuner cards that also recieve FM? A whole $0.05 of tin to sheild the analog parts of the system, and everything is fine.
That's the one redeeming quality of computers over every other electronic device, at least they are adequately sheilded. You will probably get more interference from your TV set than you computer.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
thanks for a new vocab word too ;)
This post was brought to you by the number 584811 and the characters / and .
If you've read the article, it's not just an reinvention of wheel:
According to Vanu, unlike traditional hardware radios, which are limited to one specific type of communication service, "software radio" technology enables a single wireless device to implement multiple radio standards and frequency bands, thus eliminating the ened for multiple hardware radios when communication with multiple radio services is required.
Check the local hardware shop. A hardware with comparable functionalities is very expensive. I'm sure the manufacturer has targeted this specific market segment correctly.
Compare it with a home-use radio is just like comparing a professional camera with an instant-camera.
Someone else got it right. This is more like being able to configure a particular device to do any wireless standard without requiring custom RF hardware, ASICs, and DSPs to do the signal processing and modulation/demodulation for each technology it handles. All the protocols and such (if we're talking about something like a GSM/TDMA/CDMA phone) would already be handled in software anyway. It's the low layer h/w receiver, transmitter, and signal processing (i.e. radio) stuff that's expensive to design and build and fit into portable devices. It sounds like this is their reference design and probably their intention is to try and license this technology to PDA and mobile phone makers.
No this uses the huge sleeve addon for the iPaq, it's about 3/4 as thick as the iPaq and the same in all of the other dimensions.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Well the current prototype is the size of the entire PC-Card sleeve for the iPaq so I don't think it's quite ready for even Type 3 PC Card form factor.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I would really expect it to be only a receiver.
You've misunderstood the type of radio here. It has a transmitter so it can be used as a walkie-talkie or a cell-phone, which use the radio frequency spectrum although they are not "radios" in the layman's use of the term. The transmission power can be very small because it only needs to reach a base station which has a huge recieving antenna, or another walkie-talkie within a normal walkie-talkie range. There is no indication in the article that the tiny transmitting antenna could generate a useful pirate radio station signal.
Besides, it is trivially easy to set up a pirate FM transmitter with readily available parts. This gives no obvious advantage for that application.
First off I'd like to see you make a pcs decoder for $0.30 seeing that its a digital signal.
Secondly, its not scarier in software per say... but rather the automation that can be done. Just like spammers can send out millions of emails each night with a few machines hooked up to the net, so too can this make it too easy to use. With just a few scanners automatically looking over the 49 Mhz (old cordless), 900 Mhz cordless, 800Mhz cell phones, PCS standard frequencies such as TDMA and GSM and any other private band increases the odds of finding something... Now mount this into a truck and drive it into a residential location or a really busy business location and poof.. with a twenty of these little babies with voice recognition aided scanning they could easily scan airwaves looking for potential targets... Its bad enough one person may be able to listen in... Its another once things get automated. You run a much bigger chance of being on the receiving end of privacy invasion.
To drive my point in... say these things (all numbers are fictitious to illustrate point) end up costing 40 bux in parts each. Now, somebody with a clue with the potential adds keyword voice recognition scanning (which includes a vast amount of freely available information to aid this just like the link I posted in my post) to the software so they can listen in and start recording once they find a specific keyword.
Now the scary part..
A typical $1000 PC say can handle 10 of them per machine...that's $1400 to scan 10 channels at a time. You add 10 PC in the back of truck for 14000 and you can scan 100 channels at time for useful information... if there's nothing on a particular channel say somebody hung up, it could always hunt for open channels... So they guy with this truck parked on the street in the middle of wall street drinking his latté now has all the inside trading information that he wants and retires with such a small investment.
Technology is a great thing... but with such power the old saying applies. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
tkcRadio doesn't count then? Okay, so it's internet radio not normal AM/FM, but still, tkcRadio has been out for a while. [and yes, it's for the Zaurus, of course!]
Who said Freedom was Fair?
Hey! I resemble that remark. Ham radio is still alive and kicking. Hams are just as much geeks as any other computer geek. Some of us (like me) enjoy computers and amateur radio. I have spent many thousands of dollars in ham gear and many thousands of dollars in computer gear. The only difference is not only will my ham radio gear work without the internet, but it will hold it's value far longer than any of my computer equipment. DSP radios are not new, our local group here is working on a DSP based data radio. Other groups like TAPR sell a DSP radio kit.
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Besides which, GSM mobile phones typically use they're processing power to allow them to do fast frequency hopping, etc.
Unfortunately, that key takes Here is a page talking about it: both A5/1 and A5/2 are trivial to crack - probably significantly easier than receiving the radio signal itself!
ISTR France insisted on limiting GSM's crypto strength; at the time the standards were being written, their crypto laws made US export restrictions seem positively libertarian! (Remember when browsers came in three crypto strengths - US domestic [128 bit], export [40 bit] and French [no crypto at all]?) I can't see any obvious reports on this in Google, but Lucky Green has some, er, "suspect" results - for example, the GSM key generation is deliberately crippled. (10 of the 64 bits are hard-wired to 0...) GSM was certainly designed with priorities other than the user's privacy...