All this about GPL has been interesting in that at Dayton some years ago I
purchase a SoftWave ISA plug in receiver for (guessing) about what I paid
for the SDR original. Worked well until I upgraded to Win 98. Seems that
VisualBasic VBRUN keeps changing and not always backwards compatible.
Finally managed to load in the software using the old VBRUN and then
changing to the new one. They had great SWL databases and code written in
(?) Latvia or one of those 'captive' nations. So I still have an ISA
computer on the desk for legacy stuff.
Well, someone from a major company asked if they could borrow it to see how
it compared with their planned project. "Shudder that anyone would do
that!" They then tried to contact the developers, no joy. Rumor was that
the company fell apart, guys not talking to one another. No code or
development info anywhere. There have apparently been a few of these RX
around, but little info. Basically junk.
The same with the metricom 2.3 GHz modems that pyrojoe sells on eBay. No
data. I did reverse engineer most of the RF stuff, but even data sheets on
the parts are a bit hard to get and apparently all documentation was
destroyed when the company failed.
Such a shame the this valuable, proprietary info is so valuable that it is
destroyed.
With the stage of development with the SDR, you can at least look at a
schematic, and play. And this "lack of documentation" is much better than
the above two examples.
If you think the whimpering on the Orion list that arose when the Orion II
was announced, wait until you see what happens here someday when the SDRXXX
comes out with all of this code compiled and it includes some built in
dongle which is needed to run the software.
I for one would simply be happy to get yet another improvement in radio
equipment/technology. Just hope for some hooks so I don't have to discard
because there is no software.
On the basement shelves in rough order of accumulation since 1954: homebrew
rx/tx, ARC5 rx/tx/, Viking Valiant/Viking II, S40b, SX101Mk3/HT-32,
homebrew, TS940 and now Orion & SDR1000 on the bench.
I can still pull out the manual and fix all but the latter three easily. Am
hoping that the SDR series will continue the trend.
N0UU
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