At 09:42 AM 4/13/2007, Lyle Johnson wrote: >>Probably the single biggest difference between the two is that you >>can't change the software in the IC7000, because it's got equipment >>authorization and the FCC won't allow it to be changeable to keep that auth. > >??? > >How does TenTec do it with the Orion, Jupiter, Argonaut V, ... and >still keep their authorization?
Closed source? They don't publish the internal interfaces or software documentation, so it would be quite difficult for you to (legally) create something that would work. Sure you could reverse engineer it, but that might get into trouble with DMCA.. And ultimately, it's between the mfr and the FCC.. it's a negotiated process because the Part 15 rules are not all that cut and dried. See the cut and pasted comment from Ten-Tec in 2004 below. I note that they did not address the equipment authorization issue, but a happy toiler could probably go to the fcc website and look up their application, and in there somewhere will be a complete description of how they meet the requirement. It's there for the IC7000 (I having looked to see if it would ever be possible to "reflash" the dsp code.. nope.. mask rom) What is not understood about this discussion is that the DSP code takes a serious engineering effort to create and cannot be simply given away for anyone (including companies that compete with us) to use. We have lots of competition both in the amateur radio and non-amateur radio arenas; to simply give away our intellectual property would let others use our engineering effort to their advantage. Perhaps years from now, when current equipment is discontinued the possibility of making it available for use and experimentation could be discussed - but in the short term, there is no possibility of this happening. Leaving aside the entire discussion of what a project it would be to try to provide tech support for people troubleshooting their own version of our code to make their radio do something specific and/or modify the existing radio. We do custom engineering work all the time. There are customized versions of DSP radios that we sell as off-the-shelf items out in circulation right now - and there was a significant cost incurred for engineering time to create these items. The eventual owners of these custom radios paid a hefty price to use our engineering time to modify our intellectual property to get exactly what they wanted. Slightly different topic: I've been following the discussion about the recent lack of Jupiter updates with a bit of trepidation. We've taken a lot of heat over "look how many firmware updates there have been for this rig..." and the converse is "After three years, there haven't been recent updates coming for this rig..." - that's hard to win either way. Yes, updates for the Orion will continue until some future date. No, we haven't done any updates for the Jupiter since fall of '03 after three years of issuing them. That doesn't mean we won't do them in future, however. Scott Robbins W4PA Amateur Radio Product Manager, Ten-Tec, Inc. Jim, W6rmk _______________________________________________ FlexRadio mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flex-radio.biz/mailman/listinfo/flexradio_flex-radio.biz Archive Link: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexradio%40flex-radio.biz/ FlexRadio Knowledge Base: http://kb.flex-radio.com/ FlexRadio Homepage: http://www.flex-radio.com/
