Less potential for vandalism is its embedded in the road.
LOL so you think. Give the 4chan-ers a box full of BBs or ball bearings and watch the fun begin. Depending on rotational freq etc this could be pretty exciting or dangerous.
Foreign conductive bodies are the bane of high power wireless charging. Womens fashion shoes with a conductive ring, finger rings like wedding rings, all issues with high power chargers. Even bycycle and motorcycle wheels are round enough to act as a shorted turn. Using rotating magnet power is no less of a hassle.
And to add to this, redundant tubes. So if one day you decide to switch to glassfiber, extra speakers, or something, you don't have to break up all the wall's again, just run them through those tubes.
They've got a ranch so just make the basement ceiling accessible (acoustic panels or whatever) and fishing thru uninsulated inside walls is no challenge. Insulated walls are a slight challenge but not too bad.
If you've got 2 stories then the upper story gets wiring fished thru the attic.
If you've got 3 stories then I donno. Suffer I guess.
My wife and I are re-modeling my in-law's 3000 sq foot single-level house
We will be taking most of the house down to studs
Do you mean the modern american "royal we" where it means you're contracting a citizen who subcontracts to another citizen who hires illegals to do all the labor at 50% to 100% profit markup each step and you expect to do nothing more strenuous than sign a contract, or you're literally doing the old school "we" as in we're the only people doing work inside the house? This has a huge impact on planning.
we're both very wired, tech-savvy individuals
So doing the grunt work (if not all the work, depending on nanny state building codes) of the electrical work MIGHT be in your grasp, but bare stud drywall work is frankly pretty easy to half ass yet very hard to make look good / perfect.
Plumbing is hard because you need to use a $150 wrench, once, to install some weird gasket that you can't buy at a big box store. Hire that out along with drywall.
TVs in the bedroom and dining room
Yer doin it wrong, if the most interesting thing to happen in those rooms comes out of a TV speaker. If you "have to" eat in front of the tube, sit in the living room like a good couch potatoe. I used to use a TV in the bedroom WRT mid-sleep storm warning siren evaluations, but the phone seems to have taken over that duty.
What would you do if you had 10-20,000 to spend for this kind of remodel project?
Hmm bare walls and a hair over $3/sq foot. Even the cheapest home depot "basement grade tile" costs over half that, and still leaves you with bare stud walls. There has to be a dropped zero in there somewhere?
If you just meant tech, and you insist on new/top of the line only, you won't be able to do much with only $10K.
I think you're in way over your head.
What else have geeks done/planned to do?
You'll be overwhelmed if you do it all at once. The best system is built by accretion, just like a black hole. Way over a decade I started with a nice linux based fileserver... well, add a RS-232 interface and some more software and I've got some home automation, boils down to the worlds most elaborate NTP time disciplined, astronomically aware (sunrise/sunset) timer system. Then add a PCI video capture card and some more software and I've got mythtv. It turns out that cheapie whole house audio (aka just put a speaker in every room with elaborate parallel/series interconnections) is cheap and easy to install, and I've already got a fileserver full of content so buy some speakers and rolls of wire and... Repeat a zillion times adding all kinds of weird stuff and you eventually get my house. I can't imagine doing it at the same time, even worse all at the same time as ripping the house down to the studs.
"Adding tech" is best managed as a permanent process, not an isolated single huge project.
For culinary-minded geeks, I'd love any ideas you have to surprise my wife with cool kitchen gadgets or designs.
This I don't even understand, and I like to experiment with cooking. More convenient storage than a house your size "should" have. A walk in pantry is not out of line plus a closet for appliances / things. Every AC power outlet is a home run 15 amp ckt, no daisy chaining such that running the slow cooker, the lights, and the microwave at the same time trip a breaker. If you really wanted you could blow your entire remodel budget on one (exotic) industrial-grade appliance like a combi-oven. I've often wished for one of those 10 horsepower restaurant dishwashers with a 7 minute cycle time (as opposed to my 150 or so minute 1/2 hp dishwasher).
Speaking of lights most kitchens are designed by interior decorators who apparently are very good at being trendy but eat exclusively at trendy urban restaurants. Be very careful as its
a person who tested as average a century ago would today be declared mentally retarded.
Note decline in religiosity.
Also, despite widely held belief to the contrary, civilization might be killing off genetic lines of the stupid, which is good news, at least for/.ers who want to get some.
I think you're confusing "interferes with" which merely requires ruining the signal to noise ratio by enough that you can't demod without errors, with vaporizes.
You're talking about a temporary impairment, they're talking about the equivalent of putting your bluetooth gear in the microwave and turning it on until smoke is emitted.
Or another analogy is the geometry of sunlight on my deck railings makes shadows aka ugly black bars on the deck, but that's a far cry from using a giant magnifying glass to burn permanent ugly black bars into my deck.
how are you supposed to record electromagnetic radiation when you are shielding against electromagnetic radiation? (optical filters and/or faraday cage?)
Waveguides are excellent high pass filters with great ultimate attenuation. If you don't believe me, do two experiments and look down the center of a straight section, and then wave a 9-volt battery on one end and a voltmeter on the other. I can't be bothered to look up circ waveguide cutoff freqs vs a standard c-mount inner diameter, but right off the top of my head a cmount hole is probably small enough to stick inside a piece of rectangular WR-42 waveguide so just tune your master blaster missile to somewhere lower than 25 or so GHz and the attenuation thru a cmount is likely to exceed 100 dB or so. Best ask a EE to model it to make sure you haven't built a coupling iris instead of a waveguide. In fact put a tiny little CCD with a pinhole lens in a small metal box that is way too small to resonate at the master blaster freq. Talk to an optician about designing the longest narrowest possible lens system aka a submarine periscope and make the tube outta metal aka a long narrow circ waveguide operating way below cutoff.
More likely the fail mode will be something like they don't like videos uploaded to youtube of them beating up minorities, so every time they arrest someone they blast everyone in the area... Innocent bystander has a pacemaker? Too bad so sad what are you supporting the terrorists because if your not with us you're against us
Seriously though, no non-technical end users whom the desktop is being aimed at (why?) know what compositing is. Need to describe it in terms of what it looks like. You need to explain that its, um, well, you know those useless decorations that make the computer seem slower than it really is? Yeah its them. Oh you mean my computer will run faster? Cool!
The problem is probably that he missed they "clump" packets together. If they hadn't done that, then this FEC scheme would work pretty well for UDP.
Any post 1980's telephone modem (needs trellis coding from a 14.4 modem or better) already does FEC at layer 1... this is a scheme to reimplement that idea over wifi by doing it at layer 3, which seems superficially kinda dumb. Common rule of networking is always push that kind of stuff as low in the OSI model as possible... I do believe that given an awful layer 1, a cruddy implementation at layer 3 will improve overall system thruput... its still a bad design.
any product release since the iphone has been described other than ""In the biggest surprise since the original iPhone..."
I'm not sure, but I think they Might Possibly sell a little tablet-ette a wee bit bigger than my trusty rusty ipod touch and a big smaller than my trusty almost as rusty ipad-1, in other words almost the same shape and size as a kindle reader (With Special Offers(tm))
A real surprise would be Apple announcing "F all this computer shit, we're reorganizing as a produce orchard and selling real apples"
Basically A predicted a quake would strike based on multiple measurements, and got a judicial gag order and police breathing down his neck. Its bad for tourism, you know? B was used as a weapon against A Quake happens. A writes papers, makes presentations, gets his gag order lifted, turns out he was correct after all. Whoops. B gets a sound spanking today.
The real crooks are the cops and civil defense people, not the peons they used as weapons against the guy who correctly predicted the quakes. But they're above the law, so the peons get jail time instead.
In the end, too many people died, therefore either these guys were going to jail or Giuliani was going to jail. All things considered, they probably made the least wrong choice by sending these guys to jail.
As that radio dude used to say "... and now you know the rest of the story"
If the call center workers are speaking their language grammatically correct enough, it could be some of the Americans that sound the worst over the support call.
When you stay on the rails, like a bad FPS, they may as well be replaced with a tape recorder or soundboard. When you get off the (literal) script that the situation devolved into bonkers conversations if the employee can't communicate. Grammatically correct Usually reflects the script author's abilities rather than the employees abilities.
Maybe the translator could be used in reverse, with soundboards. So the Dell owner gets translated into Arabic or whatever and the call center drone pieces together the story and clicks the mouse button where "Bob" in a perfectly cultured UK voice explains how to verify the power cord is plugged in. Any telephone call requiring actual interaction could be a click button to "transfer to my supervisor" who is merely a slightly higher paid drone.
Its interesting that a "human language AI app" will probably be used primarily to dehumanize employees and customers. AI people always seemed to expect better, like it would lead to a virtual UN for all humanity or some other pie in the sky stuff rather than a new digital sweatshop.
How is an English-only voice processor going to help you comprehend the strange utterances of southerners?
Having lived in Alabama for awhile in the 90s, luckily they speak so blasted slow that you can devote twice, maybe three times as much processing power. Assuming the translator is processing limited.
Why? Other than its usually worked out so far on a big enough scale.
I'd argue something like more systemic complexity requires more management which requires skilled people... so far.... and until you run out of skilled people.
then the vast majority of people would be unemployed.
Maybe not "vast" but we're basically already there right around only about half the population produces. And it sucks.
Don't worry humans, most of you are not going to lose your translation job.
We already limit human translators to "important" stuff only.
The people most likely to lose their jobs are Indian call centers. Soon, you'll be "talking" to Bob at Dell who walks you thru power cycling your windows box, but he's actually in Afghanistan and doesn't speak a word of English. Also instead of telemarketing scum leaving messages on my answering machine, they'll be having Turing test conversations about how I should vote for any politician but Johnson (whom I am voting for).
I'm sure there will be a contractual limitation not to do anything important with the service "So I'm not telling ya all, that ya all can't not shut off the backup reactor cooling pump disabling relay..." WTF does that mean in English much less Japanese? So... no critical infrastructure support, no medical, no legal, no engineering, no management, no HR, no accounting... whats left other than telemarketing and call centers?
This is why $300 is cheap for an SDR; but $30 is expensive for a wifi dongle.
$21 is cheap for a SDR... kit. I built this one for 30M band back when it was about $12. If you are lucky you can get the correct assembled TV dongle off ebay for $10 or so.
where people who realize that 'obscurity' ain't gonna cut it as a security strategy
They made certain RF / DSP / digital design decisions that provide a rather hard constraint. If they can flood the market using govt money, no one out there will have gear with IMD performance better than 8 bit, sample rates higher than 20 Msps, the RF chain probably means miserable performance both at very weak signals and very strong, and board PCB routing probably means some interesting (intentional?) RF birdies both in RX and more importantly in TX.
So... once you've put non.mil research into a carefully specified box, you can quite easily do your real.mil work outside the carefully specified box. Use a modulation that has to sample 100 MHz of spectrum to demodulate. Who knows.
Its an effort to stop market convergence, to drive them apart / separate more so than to open up an already thriving open environment.
Regardless of the tuner, software or whatever.... antennas have to follow laws of physics.
The A/D sampler on the board only runs at 20 MSPS with a lower cutoff around 100 MHz so worst case antenna work is at the lower end 100 MHZ +/- 20 MHZ or so which is not terribly heroic we figured out "FM radio" and "TV antennas" a long time ago. At the high end as a percentage, the rather optimistic 6 GHZ +/- 20 MHZ is so narrow I cannot build a filter that narrow much less an antenna narrower than that.
I don't know the settling rate/speed of the synths so freq hopping may be (or may not be) out of the question so you're pretty much stuck with narrow-ish band operation.
Main difference is this board has a 8-bit 20 Msps A/D onboard and the UHFSDR has it offboard (assuming you'll use a "16" bit 44+ Ksps soundcard)
You can see quite a difference in implied project design here.... Is it even possible to pass FCC regs for IMD trying to transmit a 8-bit SSB signal, and obviously a audio soundcard doesn't sample wide enough to do wifi or whatever fast digital stuff you'd like. So its broadband digital strong signal type of toy as opposed to something like a UHFSDR which is the opposite.
Can you really shove 20 Msps thru a USB reliably? I used to think no, but...
I'll be watching this with great interest since one of the biggest problems with the lower-cost software radios is band coverage.
I didn't see any switchable bandpass filters, or anything like that. I haven't found a schematic but you can just look at the board and figure out whats going on. It looks like its buildable for on board PCB antenna or external, like solder in the SMA jack OR the 0-ohm jumper at the arrow to connect the pcb antenna. Looks like 2 stages of RF amp MMICs before it hits a mixer. You can see the "I" and "Q" PCB traces in the upper left for both the TX and RX mixer. Apparently the design goals are all half duplex but the actual board design appears to use separate TX and RX stages at the hard/expensive end. Where's the VCOs or more likely DDS synths? I'm guessing on the other side of the board? I bet if I spent more than 5 minutes looking at it, perhaps with the wiki page open and looking at some of the device data sheets while looking at the PCB, I could tell you a lot more about the design.
From looking at the board layout I don't think it's going to work at 6 GHz or at least not work to maximum specs. You can tell the designer came from the "digital camp" into SDR work rather than up from the "analog camp" into SDR work. Little things like how signals are run, some layout choices, some design choices.
For a good time, look at the board picture, which has a URL silkscreened on it, click thru to
The "design goals" "hardware components" and "clocking", combined with the PCB, could tell you pretty much everything you need to know about this design.
You need an app that requires coverage from 100 MHz (why not down to 75 MHz for international FM broadcast band RX? Only need down to 87 or so in the USA..)
Usually wide band antenna design is not much of an issue in RF projects at the higher frequencies. Its pretty hard to make a dipole that covers the entire ham radio 3.5 to 4 mhz band than to cover a much smaller octave range at microwave bands.
Also "relatively optimized" is kinda non-specific. My antenna for 2M is optimized for clean pattern first and gain second and bandwidth a distant 3rd... I don't believe it can be used above 145 MHz or so. Which for my use is perfectly OK.
A "good" example of an antenna optimized for wide bandwidth would be an old fashioned VHF-lo thru UHF rooftop TV antenna. Miserable gain but crazy almost 10:1 frequency range.
Slashdot Mirror
Less potential for vandalism is its embedded in the road.
LOL so you think. Give the 4chan-ers a box full of BBs or ball bearings and watch the fun begin. Depending on rotational freq etc this could be pretty exciting or dangerous.
Foreign conductive bodies are the bane of high power wireless charging. Womens fashion shoes with a conductive ring, finger rings like wedding rings, all issues with high power chargers. Even bycycle and motorcycle wheels are round enough to act as a shorted turn. Using rotating magnet power is no less of a hassle.
I'd run coax, ethernet, and phone line everywhere,
I did that, and now no longer have a use for coax or phone line.
I'd double run any ethernet line so if one cable breaks you switch to alternate. I only need 1 working line to plug a switch into at the point of use.
And to add to this, redundant tubes. So if one day you decide to switch to glassfiber, extra speakers, or something, you don't have to break up all the wall's again, just run them through those tubes.
They've got a ranch so just make the basement ceiling accessible (acoustic panels or whatever) and fishing thru uninsulated inside walls is no challenge. Insulated walls are a slight challenge but not too bad.
If you've got 2 stories then the upper story gets wiring fished thru the attic.
If you've got 3 stories then I donno. Suffer I guess.
My wife and I are re-modeling my in-law's 3000 sq foot single-level house
We will be taking most of the house down to studs
Do you mean the modern american "royal we" where it means you're contracting a citizen who subcontracts to another citizen who hires illegals to do all the labor at 50% to 100% profit markup each step and you expect to do nothing more strenuous than sign a contract, or you're literally doing the old school "we" as in we're the only people doing work inside the house? This has a huge impact on planning.
we're both very wired, tech-savvy individuals
So doing the grunt work (if not all the work, depending on nanny state building codes) of the electrical work MIGHT be in your grasp, but bare stud drywall work is frankly pretty easy to half ass yet very hard to make look good / perfect.
Plumbing is hard because you need to use a $150 wrench, once, to install some weird gasket that you can't buy at a big box store. Hire that out along with drywall.
TVs in the bedroom and dining room
Yer doin it wrong, if the most interesting thing to happen in those rooms comes out of a TV speaker. If you "have to" eat in front of the tube, sit in the living room like a good couch potatoe. I used to use a TV in the bedroom WRT mid-sleep storm warning siren evaluations, but the phone seems to have taken over that duty.
What would you do if you had 10-20,000 to spend for this kind of remodel project?
Hmm bare walls and a hair over $3/sq foot. Even the cheapest home depot "basement grade tile" costs over half that, and still leaves you with bare stud walls. There has to be a dropped zero in there somewhere?
If you just meant tech, and you insist on new/top of the line only, you won't be able to do much with only $10K.
I think you're in way over your head.
What else have geeks done/planned to do?
You'll be overwhelmed if you do it all at once. The best system is built by accretion, just like a black hole. Way over a decade I started with a nice linux based fileserver... well, add a RS-232 interface and some more software and I've got some home automation, boils down to the worlds most elaborate NTP time disciplined, astronomically aware (sunrise/sunset) timer system. Then add a PCI video capture card and some more software and I've got mythtv. It turns out that cheapie whole house audio (aka just put a speaker in every room with elaborate parallel/series interconnections) is cheap and easy to install, and I've already got a fileserver full of content so buy some speakers and rolls of wire and... Repeat a zillion times adding all kinds of weird stuff and you eventually get my house. I can't imagine doing it at the same time, even worse all at the same time as ripping the house down to the studs.
"Adding tech" is best managed as a permanent process, not an isolated single huge project.
For culinary-minded geeks, I'd love any ideas you have to surprise my wife with cool kitchen gadgets or designs.
This I don't even understand, and I like to experiment with cooking. More convenient storage than a house your size "should" have. A walk in pantry is not out of line plus a closet for appliances / things. Every AC power outlet is a home run 15 amp ckt, no daisy chaining such that running the slow cooker, the lights, and the microwave at the same time trip a breaker. If you really wanted you could blow your entire remodel budget on one (exotic) industrial-grade appliance like a combi-oven. I've often wished for one of those 10 horsepower restaurant dishwashers with a 7 minute cycle time (as opposed to my 150 or so minute 1/2 hp dishwasher).
Speaking of lights most kitchens are designed by interior decorators who apparently are very good at being trendy but eat exclusively at trendy urban restaurants. Be very careful as its
a person who tested as average a century ago would today be declared mentally retarded.
Note decline in religiosity.
Also, despite widely held belief to the contrary, civilization might be killing off genetic lines of the stupid, which is good news, at least for /.ers who want to get some.
I think you're confusing "interferes with" which merely requires ruining the signal to noise ratio by enough that you can't demod without errors, with vaporizes.
You're talking about a temporary impairment, they're talking about the equivalent of putting your bluetooth gear in the microwave and turning it on until smoke is emitted.
Or another analogy is the geometry of sunlight on my deck railings makes shadows aka ugly black bars on the deck, but that's a far cry from using a giant magnifying glass to burn permanent ugly black bars into my deck.
how are you supposed to record electromagnetic radiation when you are shielding against electromagnetic radiation? (optical filters and/or faraday cage?)
Waveguides are excellent high pass filters with great ultimate attenuation. If you don't believe me, do two experiments and look down the center of a straight section, and then wave a 9-volt battery on one end and a voltmeter on the other. I can't be bothered to look up circ waveguide cutoff freqs vs a standard c-mount inner diameter, but right off the top of my head a cmount hole is probably small enough to stick inside a piece of rectangular WR-42 waveguide so just tune your master blaster missile to somewhere lower than 25 or so GHz and the attenuation thru a cmount is likely to exceed 100 dB or so. Best ask a EE to model it to make sure you haven't built a coupling iris instead of a waveguide. In fact put a tiny little CCD with a pinhole lens in a small metal box that is way too small to resonate at the master blaster freq. Talk to an optician about designing the longest narrowest possible lens system aka a submarine periscope and make the tube outta metal aka a long narrow circ waveguide operating way below cutoff.
More likely the fail mode will be something like they don't like videos uploaded to youtube of them beating up minorities, so every time they arrest someone they blast everyone in the area... Innocent bystander has a pacemaker? Too bad so sad what are you supporting the terrorists because if your not with us you're against us
Of course then you lose compositing
Oh the humanity! Think Of The Children!
Seriously though, no non-technical end users whom the desktop is being aimed at (why?) know what compositing is. Need to describe it in terms of what it looks like. You need to explain that its, um, well, you know those useless decorations that make the computer seem slower than it really is? Yeah its them. Oh you mean my computer will run faster? Cool!
The problem is probably that he missed they "clump" packets together. If they hadn't done that, then this FEC scheme would work pretty well for UDP.
Any post 1980's telephone modem (needs trellis coding from a 14.4 modem or better) already does FEC at layer 1... this is a scheme to reimplement that idea over wifi by doing it at layer 3, which seems superficially kinda dumb. Common rule of networking is always push that kind of stuff as low in the OSI model as possible... I do believe that given an awful layer 1, a cruddy implementation at layer 3 will improve overall system thruput... its still a bad design.
5 Minutes and no takers?
They're all trying to use seamonkey to fake the user-agent string so the apple keynote can be viewed.
And they don't update their versions like crazy either
LOL they release weekly just like FF, only difference being they increment the version # by less than 0.01 usually, instead of 1 like FF. Big deal.
http://www.seamonkey-project.org/news
I was going to ask sarcastically if any
any product release since the iphone has been described other than ""In the biggest surprise since the original iPhone..."
I'm not sure, but I think they Might Possibly sell a little tablet-ette a wee bit bigger than my trusty rusty ipod touch and a big smaller than my trusty almost as rusty ipad-1, in other words almost the same shape and size as a kindle reader (With Special Offers(tm))
A real surprise would be Apple announcing "F all this computer shit, we're reorganizing as a produce orchard and selling real apples"
I sincerely hope they don't plan on having a DIY 40 watt laser enclosure in every house
Next thing you know lunatics will be demanding kilowatt level radio frequency magnetrons in every kitchen.
And powering lawn trimming machines using refined ultra low flashpoint hydrocarbons
Oh the humanity think of the children
We should start somewhere a little more predictable, like economists.
And if no earthquake had happened, they would have inevitably been accused of causin a panic. The lesson here is don't be a geologist in Italy.
Golly, guess what happened WRT THIS VERY SAME EARTHQUAKE?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_L'Aquila_earthquake#Prior_warning_controversy
Basically A predicted a quake would strike based on multiple measurements, and got a judicial gag order and police breathing down his neck. Its bad for tourism, you know?
B was used as a weapon against A
Quake happens.
A writes papers, makes presentations, gets his gag order lifted, turns out he was correct after all. Whoops.
B gets a sound spanking today.
The real crooks are the cops and civil defense people, not the peons they used as weapons against the guy who correctly predicted the quakes. But they're above the law, so the peons get jail time instead.
In the end, too many people died, therefore either these guys were going to jail or Giuliani was going to jail. All things considered, they probably made the least wrong choice by sending these guys to jail.
As that radio dude used to say "... and now you know the rest of the story"
If the call center workers are speaking their language grammatically correct enough, it could be some of the Americans that sound the worst over the support call.
When you stay on the rails, like a bad FPS, they may as well be replaced with a tape recorder or soundboard. When you get off the (literal) script that the situation devolved into bonkers conversations if the employee can't communicate. Grammatically correct Usually reflects the script author's abilities rather than the employees abilities.
Maybe the translator could be used in reverse, with soundboards. So the Dell owner gets translated into Arabic or whatever and the call center drone pieces together the story and clicks the mouse button where "Bob" in a perfectly cultured UK voice explains how to verify the power cord is plugged in. Any telephone call requiring actual interaction could be a click button to "transfer to my supervisor" who is merely a slightly higher paid drone.
Its interesting that a "human language AI app" will probably be used primarily to dehumanize employees and customers. AI people always seemed to expect better, like it would lead to a virtual UN for all humanity or some other pie in the sky stuff rather than a new digital sweatshop.
How is an English-only voice processor going to help you comprehend the strange utterances of southerners?
Having lived in Alabama for awhile in the 90s, luckily they speak so blasted slow that you can devote twice, maybe three times as much processing power. Assuming the translator is processing limited.
New technologies create new opportunities.
Why? Other than its usually worked out so far on a big enough scale.
I'd argue something like more systemic complexity requires more management which requires skilled people... so far.... and until you run out of skilled people.
then the vast majority of people would be unemployed.
Maybe not "vast" but we're basically already there right around only about half the population produces. And it sucks.
limiting its use in some situations.
Don't worry humans, most of you are not going to lose your translation job.
We already limit human translators to "important" stuff only.
The people most likely to lose their jobs are Indian call centers. Soon, you'll be "talking" to Bob at Dell who walks you thru power cycling your windows box, but he's actually in Afghanistan and doesn't speak a word of English. Also instead of telemarketing scum leaving messages on my answering machine, they'll be having Turing test conversations about how I should vote for any politician but Johnson (whom I am voting for).
I'm sure there will be a contractual limitation not to do anything important with the service "So I'm not telling ya all, that ya all can't not shut off the backup reactor cooling pump disabling relay..." WTF does that mean in English much less Japanese? So... no critical infrastructure support, no medical, no legal, no engineering, no management, no HR, no accounting... whats left other than telemarketing and call centers?
This is why $300 is cheap for an SDR; but $30 is expensive for a wifi dongle.
$21 is cheap for a SDR... kit. I built this one for 30M band back when it was about $12. If you are lucky you can get the correct assembled TV dongle off ebay for $10 or so.
http://fivedash.com/
At the other end, if you'd like to spend four figures for cutting edge performance, there's always
http://www.flex-radio.com/
where people who realize that 'obscurity' ain't gonna cut it as a security strategy
They made certain RF / DSP / digital design decisions that provide a rather hard constraint. If they can flood the market using govt money, no one out there will have gear with IMD performance better than 8 bit, sample rates higher than 20 Msps, the RF chain probably means miserable performance both at very weak signals and very strong, and board PCB routing probably means some interesting (intentional?) RF birdies both in RX and more importantly in TX.
So... once you've put non .mil research into a carefully specified box, you can quite easily do your real .mil work outside the carefully specified box. Use a modulation that has to sample 100 MHz of spectrum to demodulate. Who knows.
Its an effort to stop market convergence, to drive them apart / separate more so than to open up an already thriving open environment.
Regardless of the tuner, software or whatever.... antennas have to follow laws of physics.
The A/D sampler on the board only runs at 20 MSPS with a lower cutoff around 100 MHz so worst case antenna work is at the lower end 100 MHZ +/- 20 MHZ or so which is not terribly heroic we figured out "FM radio" and "TV antennas" a long time ago. At the high end as a percentage, the rather optimistic 6 GHZ +/- 20 MHZ is so narrow I cannot build a filter that narrow much less an antenna narrower than that.
I don't know the settling rate/speed of the synths so freq hopping may be (or may not be) out of the question so you're pretty much stuck with narrow-ish band operation.
quite a few build-it-yourself radios available too
The device announced is basically equivalent in specs to the couple years old UHFSDR (not a terribly creative name) as seen at
http://wb6dhw.com/For_Sale.html#UHFSDR
Main difference is this board has a 8-bit 20 Msps A/D onboard and the UHFSDR has it offboard (assuming you'll use a "16" bit 44+ Ksps soundcard)
You can see quite a difference in implied project design here.... Is it even possible to pass FCC regs for IMD trying to transmit a 8-bit SSB signal, and obviously a audio soundcard doesn't sample wide enough to do wifi or whatever fast digital stuff you'd like. So its broadband digital strong signal type of toy as opposed to something like a UHFSDR which is the opposite.
Can you really shove 20 Msps thru a USB reliably? I used to think no, but...
I'll be watching this with great interest since one of the biggest problems with the lower-cost software radios is band coverage.
I didn't see any switchable bandpass filters, or anything like that. I haven't found a schematic but you can just look at the board and figure out whats going on. It looks like its buildable for on board PCB antenna or external, like solder in the SMA jack OR the 0-ohm jumper at the arrow to connect the pcb antenna. Looks like 2 stages of RF amp MMICs before it hits a mixer. You can see the "I" and "Q" PCB traces in the upper left for both the TX and RX mixer. Apparently the design goals are all half duplex but the actual board design appears to use separate TX and RX stages at the hard/expensive end. Where's the VCOs or more likely DDS synths? I'm guessing on the other side of the board? I bet if I spent more than 5 minutes looking at it, perhaps with the wiki page open and looking at some of the device data sheets while looking at the PCB, I could tell you a lot more about the design.
From looking at the board layout I don't think it's going to work at 6 GHz or at least not work to maximum specs. You can tell the designer came from the "digital camp" into SDR work rather than up from the "analog camp" into SDR work. Little things like how signals are run, some layout choices, some design choices.
For a good time, look at the board picture, which has a URL silkscreened on it, click thru to
https://github.com/mossmann/hackrf/wiki
The "design goals" "hardware components" and "clocking", combined with the PCB, could tell you pretty much everything you need to know about this design.
You need an app that requires coverage from 100 MHz (why not down to 75 MHz for international FM broadcast band RX? Only need down to 87 or so in the USA..)
Usually wide band antenna design is not much of an issue in RF projects at the higher frequencies. Its pretty hard to make a dipole that covers the entire ham radio 3.5 to 4 mhz band than to cover a much smaller octave range at microwave bands.
Also "relatively optimized" is kinda non-specific. My antenna for 2M is optimized for clean pattern first and gain second and bandwidth a distant 3rd... I don't believe it can be used above 145 MHz or so. Which for my use is perfectly OK.
A "good" example of an antenna optimized for wide bandwidth would be an old fashioned VHF-lo thru UHF rooftop TV antenna. Miserable gain but crazy almost 10:1 frequency range.