Flex Radio Part 1 - Page 2

The first truly Open Source Software Defined Amateur Radio Transceiver. The SDR -1000 as well as the other newer model products in the Flex line, 1500, 3000, 5000A and 5000D all define the modulation waveforms in software (SDR). Keep in mined that that most traditional analog radios are fixed in capability for all time. Since all the functionality is hard wired in the radio, there is little ability to upgrade.

Many more modern radios add proprietary digital signal processing (DSP) chips to traditional analog radio architecture to provide signal processing functions with rather limited or little capability to upgrade.

The Flex Radio SDR-1000 was the first open source software, amateur radio transceiver to incorporate the scalable DSP performance of a personal computer (PC) and sound card to perform all modulation, demodulation, and control functions of the radio.

If you take a good hard look at the technology today, you will see that the general purpose PC architecture, now vastly outperforms even the best of the proprietary (DSP) chips, always keeping in mine that the SDR allows for upgrades as new improvements come along with no hardware changes. The SDR 1000D which I currently have and use, has had at least 5 0r 6 software upgrades with no changes to hardware, except for performance! The upgrades are as simple as going to the Flex Radio web site and downloading the newest version of software to a thumb drive, which is the process that works for me, as I can download my upgrades regardless of were I might be!

The other aspect of technology that has driven SDR capabilities, is the professional audio market with constant and significant improvements in sound card technology. This is one of the major advantages of these trends as they provide upgradeable hardware performance through software improvements.

In the next part of this series, we will look at how almost ever function is done in software. Then we will look at the SDR-1000D physical hardware and the functions of the hardware components.