At 08:49 AM 4/23/2008, Edwin Marzan wrote: >Hello Tim, > >I remember a while back when PowerSDR was able to scan thru the HF >memories but for some reason it became illegal to do so in our >radios and the feature was removed. Would the same hold true for a >SDR radio that contains and 2m/70cm transverter? > >Could you tell us why scanning is not permitted in our current >version of PowerSDR but is allowed on traditional radios like the >Kenwood TS-2000, Yaesu FT-847 etc?
FCC certification processes, mostly. If you go look at the filings for the radios from the big 3, you'll see a fair amount of work involved in proving it won't do "evil things" (i.e. non-modifiable firmware). That's a pretty big challenge for a radio where almost the entire control functionality is running on a PC (for all intents and purposes, the hardware part of a F5K or SDR1K is just an A/D or D/A with a wideband tunable center frequency). These sorts of things typically are done in consultation with the local FCC office (or FCC HQ) and you come up with some sort of compromise that addresses their concerns about meeting the letter and intent of the regulations. Obviously, for Flex, the compromise is that the standard shipping software doesn't have the scanning capability, although the underlying hardware is capable of it (in the SDR1K case, perhaps not for the F5K.. there's a proprietary firmware component in the F5K that sits between the MIDI control messages coming from PowerSDR and the actual hardware control registers) Jim, W6RMK _______________________________________________ FlexRadio Systems Mailing List [email protected] http://mail.flex-radio.biz/mailman/listinfo/flexradio_flex-radio.biz Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexradio%40flex-radio.biz/ Knowledge Base: http://kb.flex-radio.com/ Homepage: http://www.flex-radio.com/
