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Universal Software Radio Peripheral From GnuRadio
The Universal Software Radio Peripheral for GNURadio has now gone into production and is
available for purchase for $450. It used to be insanely expensive to acquire this
technical equipment. Now the price has dropped by two orders of magnitude, to something about as expensive as a high-end graphics card. How long will it be till it's labeled a terrorist tool and banned?
The idea behind soft-radio is that you grab a signal from the air and use software to 'decode' it instead of hardware. So all decoding becomes an issue of software and not hardware.
You can grab an FM signal from an antenna, use some software 'stuff', and get your favorite local station to come out the computer speaker. The only hardware you need is an antenna and a frontend to pump the signal into your computer. This device is that frontend interface between the RF capture device (antenna, dish, etc) and the computer, via a USB2 plug. The reason it was developed was that this kind of hardware was either very specific (grab only FM signals or TV signals) or very expensive (the cost of a new computer or two).
The reason this will be labeled a terrorist device is because you can grab any signal from the spectrum (if you can make an antenna) so all the decoding becomes a software problem. You develop a program to decode HBO's satellite feed, and bang, this thing gets banned as a pirate device, err terrorist device as that's the buzzword dejour. Special interests will push this through Gov like everything else and claim it's destroying American capitalism, meanwhile never mentioning their monopolies destroy fair competition and hurt the consumer when prices rise.
Geeks will lament as not only is this device a reciever but it's a transmiter as well. Want to make an ad-hoc WiFi-like network on some other frequency? What about a smart 'cell' phone that makes it's own network so you don't need a common provider (think p2p phones)? As it's so new, the possibilities have not been well thought out, but technologies like this are a solution looking for a problem, kinda like the PC in the 1980s.