On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 8:19 AM, Patrik Tast <pat...@poes-weather.com> wrote:
> A comment from Jerry Martes, > "HAM amateurs spend lots more $$ than the cost of a USRP just to get things > a monkey could build. From what I have observed, there are thousands more > amateurs who buy components that those who are willing to build them. > Money seems to be unimportant in the equation amateurs use to finance their > hobbies." > > We can get an USRPx < $1.5k with daugther boards that works as is The problem with this generalization is that just as many HAMs spend very little $$ and just put the dang things together themselves (usually better than a monkey, but I'm not making any promises). I'm sure that while there is a huge potential market for the USRP, and other expensive SDR equipment, in the HAM user base, there are still a good number of people willing to put together something themselves, even if it means breaking out the soldering iron. The people that are willing to purchase a USRP and all of it's SDR glory and not the same people that want to put together something super cheap that just works for a particular hobby/project. For example, I have never gone outside of the 2.399-2.410GHz range; and probably could have gotten away with a simple 2.4GHz board rather than a full blown USRP, but it's what was available and we had the budget so we just bought it. If I had not had any funding for this project, a low cost option at a fixed frequency would have been very necessary. Looking to the future, where I'll want to branch out into other SDR projects on my own time, I would be more than willing to assemble something myself in a 900MHz range to keep costs low. Shelling out even $800 per node in a production mesh network would be ludicrous, having an open and simple design that I can modify and incorporate into other GNU/GPL projects (like a mesh node) would be ideal. Jason _______________________________________________ Discuss-gnuradio mailing list Discuss-gnuradio@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnuradio
