[lug] Linux Journal article about software radio

[Michael J. Hammel]

On Fri, 2004-05-21 at 15:58, robmohr at earthnet.net wrote:
> Is software radio just a parlor trick?  Or does it have immediate applications? 
> I am guessing here, are cell phones more software than hardware or equal parts
> of each?  Pointless question?  

Software radio is not, at least as far as I use it, a parlor trick.  I
use XM Radio at home using OpenXM, which is just a Perl daemon to
control an XMPCR device.  I wrote a UI to this (Ximba Radio) that
mimicks much of the Windows version.  The next step is to add a
GStreamer middleware that takes the input stream from the audio card
(where the radio sends its data) to stream the data around the house. 
One radio, a full house in audio via wireless networking.  This becomes
a real issue in Houston were broadcast radio sucks.  Now I get all kinds
of stuff I wouldn't otherwise get.  Oh, and I'm hoping to make the
streamer allow me to stream the audio (through an ssh tunnel) to work so
I can listen to it at work too.

I guess that would be an immediate application.  

As to cell phones being more hw than sw, that depends on your point of
view.  I worked for Samsung in Richardson for a while.  There is a *lot*
of software in the base stations.  The phones themselves carry quite a
bit more these days to handle the fancy graphics capabilities.  But the
real trick is to offload the processing to remote systems and just do
really fast, really efficient data xfer.  That could be in hw.  Could be
in sw.

-- 
Michael J. Hammel                               The Graphics Muse 
mjhammel at graphics-muse.org                      http://www.graphics-muse.com
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