"an_old_friend" wrote in message
oups.com...

Does anyone know of some fairly welknown chips that I can investigate
that
might help me to learn about dsp and how I can incorporate it into my
receiver...

In "Experimental Methods in RF Design" there is a DSP project that might be
worth looking at, however, most of the DSP chips are still pretty pricey,
and generally only available in hard to work with packages, which means
buying demo or experimenter boards that are even more pricey.

A relatively low-cost way of getting into it without going to teeny pin
spacing is to look into the dsPIC family from Microchip. In some ways, it
is a little bit of a lightweight when it comes to DSP, but some folks,
notably Leon Heller, have had some success. You might look for Leon's
postings on the microchip DSP forum at
http://forum.microchip.com/tt.asp?forumid=153 for a hint at what he has been
doing. Unfortunately, there are relatively few programmers for the dsPIC so
you either need to build something or buy a programmer from Microchip, still
quite a bit cheaper than a DSP board. Building something means building a
programmer that includes a PIC, so you need to build a programmer to program
that part first! The plain PIC programmer is a pretty quick and simple
thing, but it adds yet another step in your way.

What I would do is serch for a dsp program tat works on a PC Sound card
running your speaker output to the mic input. I have read about such
programs, but i lack a link right off.

The problem with that is the sound card manufacturers have gotten pretty
tight with their programming specs. I'm afraid you will spend more time
working out the sound card interfaces than learning about DSP.

...