[Moeller, please include some blank lines in the inline replies, as
without those your mails are much harder to read]
At 00:11 +0100 10-01-2011, Moeller wrote:
On 09.01.2011 22:34, Marcus D. Leech wrote:
> Sounds like you're volunteering to create such a project. Let us
know when > you have everything set-up, including initial high-level
designs, and
preliminary parts selections. :-)
No, but some people started (SSRP), really a good starting point...
The SSRP doesn't look too bad. Another option is the OpenHPSDR
(http://openhpsdr.org/); I believe people are working on GNUradio
drivers.
> But as an occasional small-scale hardware manufacturer myself (both in RF
> electronics and aerospace), I can tell you that simply looking at the raw
> BOM costs doesn't give you a good feel for how much it actually costs to
> produce/test/support real-world hardware.
This is the commercial point of view. I compare this to the
Microsoft-approach. They need lots of money for producing, testing
and supporting operating systems and Office.
Don't take this the wrong way, but you're sounding like a theorist
with zero experience in hardware design.
When I designed the LART (a decade-old software radio experimentation
platform), it took me two revisions of the six-layer PCB prototype
(at >$500 per revision) to get the board working. A few months later
it turned out that the voltage regulator chips I'd used were suddenly
impossible to get, so I had to do two more board re-spins. The proto
boards were assembled at a professional facility for >$1000, until I
got a reasonable yield soldering 0.5mm pitch LQFP packages myself
(destroying several PCBs and $150 processor chips in the process). To
test the boards I needed access to several tens of thousands of $
worth in logic analyzers, signal generators and spectrum analyzers.
And then there was the global tantalum capacitor shortage...
Needless to say, none of this would have happened if I would have had
to pay for it out of my own pocket. Luckily, this was a University
project, and I managed to persuade the powers that be to allow me to
release the design files.
Once again: software development and debugging is essentially free,
with a 'make' of a new revision costing nothing but time (and some
electricity). None of that is true for hardware development. Calling
it the "Microsoft-approach" doesn't change any of that.
I think for $100-$300 you could build a good SDR with mass-market
chips (USRP uses quite common chips), affordable for students and
hobbyists, with certain trade-offs regarding maximum performance.
If you were talking software, I'd say "please post your patch".
I'm looking forward to reviewing your schematics and/or layout. If
you want to do the work, I'll gladly assist. If you're trying to get
other people to do the heavy lifting, I would respectfully ask you to
grow up.
JD 'http://xkcd.com/386/' B.
--
LART. 250 MIPS under one Watt. Free hardware design files.
http://www.lartmaker.nl/
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