Hi guys, It really surprised me that no one either threw candy at me or fell asleep at the presentation. It must be those in this group have developed a talent for staying awake (or at least looking like they were awake) during what was probably a boring presentation.
Obviously I only presented a very small view of what I see going on with that topic. I figure some of those in the NLUG group might find it interesting and possibly worthwhile to hop into some of those projects, if for no other reason to improve the capabilities of the software. Not tonight, but next few days when I get a few minutes I will post a few bits (not necessarily Amateur Radio related) that some of those in the group might find worth reading or watching. For the Hams in the group, they may (or may not) be familiar with exactly how fast the state of the art is moving. A few points that I didn't mention this evening were: Much of the technology that we now see in HD TV and HD Radio related to encoding and decoding data was being used on the ham bands back in the 1980s. It was not exactly the same, but it surprised me years ago when I found the encoding used for that stuff was what I was using for several digital links when some of the higher speed packet stuff was running. The SDR and DSP stuff is evolving at a rapid pace. There are some things out in the market that use bits of that technology, but for the most part we are at the bleeding edge of being able to use that for many different purposes. Everything from hearing aids to audio processing / RF transmission is using it and pushing the envelope. I didn't get into an specifics on software for that, since it runs the gamut from C developers to Ruby, to those writing shell scripts for some of the things driving those projects. I do think we could help to push along some of those things, Flex http://www.flex-radio.com/ made the decision on their latest model to do some of the heavy lifting in the box and export the control (and much of the other data) through the network interface. Unfortunately there is FPGA and related hardware in the box that will not be open to the public (at least that is what I last heard). The Apache Labs operation https://apache-labs.com/ is planning on their box (the Anan-100D box) being not only open source for the control program, but open hardware and FPGA code. One of the more interesting problems that this technology created several years ago when it was first proved functional was the FCC didn't know what to do with it, and was afraid it was going to be outside of their control. That was part of the reason they forced hardware filters to be included in the transmitter design. I suspect they are still figuring out how to deal with that. There have been many instances over the years where they wanted to do such things as put non standard connectors on such things as wifi equipment so people could not easily modify things. Unfortunately, that really didn't work very well (imagine a different connector for every antenna connection coming off the assembly line). On a somewhat related note, it would be interesting to have a few of those in the group trained to help with configuring some of the digital mode software out there. Particularly things like pskmail http://pskmail.wikispaces.com/, even Winlink and Winmor http://www.winlink.org/ might come in quite useful along with such things as fldigi http://www.w1hkj.com/, xastir http://www.xastir.org/wiki/Main_Page to name a few. Enough for now. Maybe one of these days we can get more people at the meetings and torture them with Pizza after the program. Dave -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NLUG" group. To post to this group, send email to nlug-talk@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to nlug-talk+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nlug-talk?hl=en
