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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."
of software radio is the ability to modify the code and tromp all over someone elses legally protected frequency range. Some of the big nonos include sending on ATC (air traffic controll) frequencies and numerous other military and civil service bands.
Someone corect me if I am wrong, but couldn't the transceiver be built with hardware filters on those bands and thus sidestep the issue of broadcast interference? I know this is not as nice as having a fully programmable software radio transmitter, but otherwise I really don't see the FCC granting any kind of production licensing for these.
Anyone else have solutions to this dilemma?
-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
You're looking at this from the wrong level - this thing still has all the hardware to receive RF, the funky thing is that the radio demodulation/modulation et al is programmable. At the band's this is running at, it's not so interesting, but once you get up to 900MHz (and later at 2.4GHz+), you essentially have a device that can communicate with any RF device on its supported bands.
What this means (in the future, with 2.4GHz+ capable devices) is that one device (be it your PDA, mobile phone, PCMCIA card) can be a GSM phone, can be a CDMA phone, can be a 3G phone, can be a CB/commercial/police radio receiver, it could even be used for 802.11b or Bluetooth. The possibilities for software radio are mind boggling. Linux is really irrelevant in the scheme of things, it's essentially just used to bolt the stuff together - it's the underlying technology that is impressive.
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.