[Roger Hayter]

Jerry Stuckle wrote:

On 2/9/2016 12:52 AM, Brian Reay wrote:


Perfectly normal, at least in the UK, for students studying various courses
(certainly the sciences) to study a programming language (in my Uni days
Fortran). My wife certainly did, we were married while at Uni (still are of
course) and we often spent lunch times preparing 'punch cards' which were
the entry method for the Uni Fortran machines.




And I suppose you learned about exothermic reactions in a World History
class.

In the United States, computer languages are taught in Computer Science
courses, not Chemistry.

Well that's yet another difference. Until the great dumbing-down of
university courses in the UK in recent years,[1] first degrees tended
not to be modular, and the department of the primary subject arranged
lecturers in necessary ancillary subjects as part of the main course.

[1] which doesn't apply to all universities.
--

Roger Hayter

[Brian Reay[_5_]]

Roger Hayter wrote:
Jerry Stuckle wrote:

On 2/9/2016 12:52 AM, Brian Reay wrote:


Perfectly normal, at least in the UK, for students studying various courses
(certainly the sciences) to study a programming language (in my Uni days
Fortran). My wife certainly did, we were married while at Uni (still are of
course) and we often spent lunch times preparing 'punch cards' which were
the entry method for the Uni Fortran machines.




And I suppose you learned about exothermic reactions in a World History
class.

In the United States, computer languages are taught in Computer Science
courses, not Chemistry.

Well that's yet another difference. Until the great dumbing-down of
university courses in the UK in recent years,[1] first degrees tended
not to be modular, and the department of the primary subject arranged
lecturers in necessary ancillary subjects as part of the main course.

[1] which doesn't apply to all universities.

A stunningly inaccurate statement. It was possible to take different
modules in top rated Universities (from a selected list) to get a degree 40
years ago. Including Oxbridge.

It still is.

True, you couldn't mix, say, engineering and tourism but different modules
in engineering (for example) were perfectly normal.

Typically, the first year was fixed but after that you could specialise in,
say, digital electronics and computing or electrical engineering and
electronics.

[Roger Hayter]

Brian Reay wrote:

Roger Hayter wrote:
snip

Well that's yet another difference. Until the great dumbing-down of
university courses in the UK in recent years,[1] first degrees tended
not to be modular, and the department of the primary subject arranged
lecturers in necessary ancillary subjects as part of the main course.

[1] which doesn't apply to all universities.

A stunningly inaccurate statement. It was possible to take different
modules in top rated Universities (from a selected list) to get a degree 40
years ago. Including Oxbridge.

Things like PPE, or PPP you mean? Whatever the theory, in practice you
couldn't dream up your own combination, there were some established ones



It still is.

True, you couldn't mix, say, engineering and tourism

That of course is what I meant. You couldn't do a Keele style degree of
knitting, Serbo-Croat, media studies and physics. I wasn't trying to
imply that their was no choice of modules in a subject. The point I
was making, of course, that things like computer programming for
chemists, while taught by the subject experts, was part of the Chemistry
degree, not a separately credited module.





but different modules
in engineering (for example) were perfectly normal.

Typically, the first year was fixed but after that you could specialise in,
say, digital electronics and computing or electrical engineering and
electronics.


--

Roger Hayter

[Brian Reay[_5_]]

On 09/02/16 20:46, Roger Hayter wrote:
Brian Reay wrote:

Roger Hayter wrote:
snip

Well that's yet another difference. Until the great dumbing-down of
university courses in the UK in recent years,[1] first degrees tended
not to be modular, and the department of the primary subject arranged
lecturers in necessary ancillary subjects as part of the main course.

[1] which doesn't apply to all universities.

A stunningly inaccurate statement. It was possible to take different
modules in top rated Universities (from a selected list) to get a degree 40
years ago. Including Oxbridge.

Things like PPE, or PPP you mean? Whatever the theory, in practice you
couldn't dream up your own combination, there were some established ones



It still is.

True, you couldn't mix, say, engineering and tourism

That of course is what I meant. You couldn't do a Keele style degree of
knitting, Serbo-Croat, media studies and physics. I wasn't trying to
imply that their was no choice of modules in a subject. The point I
was making, of course, that things like computer programming for
chemists, while taught by the subject experts, was part of the Chemistry
degree, not a separately credited module.


Roger, rather than trying to back pedal, just admit you were posting
nonsense. If they were not modules, what were they? Even if they were
called 'units', 'blocks', or whatever, it is irrelevant.

Even now, there are plenty of degrees which don't allow wild and
wonderful combinations of modules.

What happened, were you replaced by someone younger and better qualified
and it has made you bitter?








--
Now we've developed the technology to 'chip' and track every dog, why
not extend it to sex offenders.

[Roger Hayter]

Brian Reay wrote:




Roger, rather than trying to back pedal, just admit you were posting
nonsense. If they were not modules, what were they? Even if they were
called 'units', 'blocks', or whatever, it is irrelevant.

Even now, there are plenty of degrees which don't allow wild and
wonderful combinations of modules.

What happened, were you replaced by someone younger and better qualified
and it has made you bitter?

In your eagerness to make bizarre rude remarks about me you seem to
forget we were both on the same side in the originai discussion, which
was when someone expressed surprised about a Fortran course in a
Chemistry degree. You seem to have gone off at a tangent somewhere. I
must take more care about not replying to you, I suppose!


--

Roger Hayter

[Stephen Thomas Cole[_3_]]

Roger Hayter wrote:
. You couldn't do a Keele style degree of
knitting, Serbo-Croat, media studies and physics.

Damn shame, if you ask me. That degree would make for some really quite
interesting, and well-scarved, graduates.

--
STC // M0TEY // twitter.com/ukradioamateur

[Jerry Stuckle]

On 2/9/2016 4:52 PM, Roger Hayter wrote:
Brian Reay wrote:




Roger, rather than trying to back pedal, just admit you were posting
nonsense. If they were not modules, what were they? Even if they were
called 'units', 'blocks', or whatever, it is irrelevant.

Even now, there are plenty of degrees which don't allow wild and
wonderful combinations of modules.

What happened, were you replaced by someone younger and better qualified
and it has made you bitter?

In your eagerness to make bizarre rude remarks about me you seem to
forget we were both on the same side in the originai discussion, which
was when someone expressed surprised about a Fortran course in a
Chemistry degree. You seem to have gone off at a tangent somewhere. I
must take more care about not replying to you, I suppose!



The issue was not a FORTRAN course in a Chemistry degree. It was a
FORTRAN course provided by the Chemistry department - and that by
"professors" who didn't know FORTRAN.

But then trolls never learned to read. They just contradict things they
know nothing about.

--
==================
Remove the "x" from my email address
Jerry, AI0K

==================

[rickman]

On 2/6/2016 4:49 PM, Michael Black wrote:
On Sat, 6 Feb 2016, Brian Howie wrote:

In message ple.org,
Michael Black writes
On Sat, 6 Feb 2016, gareth wrote:

"Brian Howie" wrote in message
...
In message , gareth
writes
Presumably those SDR rigs which do not work on the IF but
directly from antennae must have, separately from the DSP processor,
some semblance of a DDS generator (but without the final DAC) to
act as the equivalent of the VFO, for I cannot perceive that a
fractional-Hz
tuning rate could be achieved with machine code running in the DSP
processor?
I'm not an expert ,but I think what you're asking is " how is the
local
oscillator generated" in a direct conversion SDR and "what
determines its
resolution"
There is an example here, :-
http://www.radioelementi.it/public/saqrx.pdf
The "c" source code is here,which I can just about understand ( My
software background is FORTRAN and Matlab) :-
https://sites.google.com/site/sm6lkm/saqrx/
Softies shouldn't have a problem with it although I was able to
mess about
with it and recompile it successfully
In this case the spectrum is dc to 22050Hz in 512 steps. It's not
the LO
precision ( it's floating point in this one) that limits it but
the size
of the FFT , the sample rate and thus the record length, that sets the
minimum FFT bin width . This one tunes in lumps of about 43Hz

Thank-you Brian, but what you have URLed is already at baseband,
being VLF.

I thought that was the norm, not much doing A/D at signal frequency.
Initially, it was too fast for the hardware to handle, but there are
probably some good reasons still to downconvert.

Michael

Correct , but Gareth asked about the software equivalent of a DDS
frequency synthesiser or VFO.

The "directly from antenna" in his post threw me. If there's a
heterodyne conversion, which is what he was asking I see now, then there
has to some sort of local oscillator. The way I read it was that he was
asking how to tune something that directly converted to digital. Sorry.

I'm a bit confused by the many comments about the original post, but
there is such a thing as a direct down conversion receiver. As long as
the input is sampled fast enough for the signal frequency or at least
fast enough for the bandwidth when using sub-sampling and there are
adequate filters on the input, this can work. The trouble is the
filtering. I believe that is why IF frequencies have been used, to
filter the signal more easily.

--

Rick