Software Defined Radio
The Future Salon had a session on software defined radio which I unfortunately missed. I just watched the video they put up on the Internet Archive though, definitely worth the wait for the huge download. The presentation goes into some detail about the GNUradio project, very interesting stuff. The cellular end of it is an obvious and immediately interesting aspect, but there’s also the proliferation of protocols within consumer electronics in general. Devices these days speak the range of cellular protocols, and 802.11, and Bluetooth, and RFID, and Zigbee, and Ultrawideband, and Wireless USB. And there’s location technologies that range from GPS to triangulation using cellular towers or 802.11 base stations or television or radio signals. Even if SDR doesn’t make sense to cellular carriers because it would potentially undermine the lockin they have for their investment in old technologies, I think it still makes sense for consumer electronics even if you take that part out. If you don’t have time to watch the video, at least check out the Software Defined Radio page on Wikipedia.
September 18th, 2005 at 8:01 am
For years I’ve believed SDR to be such an important technology/approach to radio convergence. I first heard of SDR back in 2000-2001, and I was very excited as I learned more about it. Yet, I’ve been surprised on how slow it has been for SDR to be understood, and adopted in general. SDR has obvious benefits from the consumer perspective.
ceo
September 18th, 2005 at 5:17 pm
It makes sense to a limited number of regulated wireless carriers — check out http://vanu.com
September 22nd, 2005 at 3:09 am
i first heard about sdr from vanu bose himself. i was covering some local mit mobile technologies showcase back in 1999 or 2000. it was mind blowing. he was working his way through different radio protocols - am, fm, amps. it was so interesting. i’ve been peeking in on his company since.
one catch was that phone (still) don’t have the processing power to do the general processing to have a sdr. but, there will be a future (thanks to moore’s law) where we have one phone that can switch to any radio frequency - wifi, 4g, 3g, 2.5g, analog, dect, fm, wimax, etc.