Hi Len,

Good response; I just have a couple of minor things to add:

wrote in message
ups.com...
If we look at what exists now, we get blase' about all the effort
involved to make a product (almost as if "it always existed...")
available for others to use. Too many of us take the THINGS we
have for granted.

When you can run down to the local computer store and buy something like a
wireless router containing a 54Mbps digital radio with very sophisticated
modulation schemes running from some embedded CPU with the equivalent
horsepower of an 80386 with 64MB of RAM, all for $39.99, I can see why. :-)

Very little actual "government software" was ever done, nearly
all was hired, contracted outside work.

I was thinking of programs such as Berkeley SPICE being "government software,"
actually.

What "the universities" do is NOT NECESSARILY what goes on in
the rest of the world! True, despite the self-promoting PR of
"the universities!"

Very true, although I think that many univerisites have found -- in the past
couple of decades -- a need to become somewhat more aligned with industry in
order to continue to procur funding.

As far as IP protection on radio hobby magazines, that's
still up in the air for many. If everyone wants to sit
around and rebuild the regenerative receiver or "design"
two-tube (or teeny two-transistor) transmitters, fine, but
that is just re-inventing the wheel for the nth time.

It is, although it can serve as a great educational tool for the person doing
it. Since ham radio is -- for most people -- a hobby, re-inventing such
radios is about the same as someone rebuliding the engine or transmission on a
classic car: The end result is still not going to be as, say, fuel efficient
or powerful as a modern design, but someone who understands the basics is then
a very large way towards understanding the modern design... if they have any
desire to do so.

When you go to student engineering design expos these days, there's usually
plenty of wireless interfaces to robots, data collection devices, etc.;
they're almost always implemented with a little wireless module where you feed
in digital data, and everything else all the way to the antenna is a black
box. What you almost never see is something like a discrete transistor radio
design implementing, say, BPSK at 1200bps (which often would suffice for the
wireless data transmission needs). Although I find this a little lamentable,
I realize that these days indsutry needs a lot more people creating such
system- or IC-level designs (rather than, say, 50 years ago when I'd expect
that most "electrical engineers" found themselves performing discrete
transistor -- or tube! -- design), and I also realize that industry still
seems to find graduates who become good RF IC designers, so clearly the
problem isn't as bad as I might imagine and is probably more a reflection of
just becoming set in my own ways instead! :-)

Much
of the output of the radio hobbyist press (other than new
product info squibs and "reviews") is the publishers
essentially copying their own old works...for their own
profit.

Sure, or someone taking an old design and adding a microcontroller
interface/LCD/etc. (Seems to crop up a lot with auto-tuners, power meters,
etc... I've been tempted to do one of these myself... something like a mobile
2m amplifier for an HT... 300mW in, 30W or so out, with digital display of SWR
or whatever... clearly the "core design" of the amplifier and SWR meter has
been around for decades now...) Granted, a lot of any "new design" is just
modifying old designs with various new ideas, but the ARRL's standard to
publish a "new" article is perhaps rather low.

If we don't have IP protection, radio hobbyists will still be
at least a half-century behind in most efforts of "radio,"
the practitioners busy, busy with nostalgic recollection of
"the good old days" that were not that "good," just
fascinating to individuals (like me) of a long time ago.

What's missing is some reasonable means of licensing IP to people who want to
use it on a hobbyist basis. A lot of the really good speech CODECs out there
are legally protected, and although I'm sure the hobbyist developer would be
happy to pay some few dollars to play with one, a large company is (typically)
not interested in dealing with a single user to license a single instance of
their technology... And even if that hobbyist's software is good, he might
sell... what... 100 or 1000 copies of it? The royalties from that pale in
comparison to licensing a CODEC to a cell phone manufacturer.

As-is, HDTV reception and demodulation by a hobbyist is still legal -- but
just barely, as various interests continue to push for "broadcast" flags. HD
Radio probably wouldn't be legal at all to sit down and demodulate, but given
that it's a proprietary standard, no hobbyist is presently able to do so
anyway. I'm all for making sure that owners of IP are fairly compensated, and
I believe that most hobbyist are willing to pay to do so, but the commerce
models to do it just aren't there yet. How far would ham radio have gotten if
it had been illegal to build your own FM radio? Or ATV receiver (since they
usually still use NTSC as the baseband format)?

On the upside, today it's easy to purchase RF components that allow one to
build radios that have better performance and are cheaper to build than ever
before. It's the hardware--software interface -- with software defined
radios starting to become commonplace -- where you can't just go to DigiKey
and purchase a CELP software license off the shelf; this is one of the
problems holding back the development of ham radio. Granted, hams could --
and do -- development a lot of these things themselves, but given their
technological sophistication, ham radio will now more than ever have to follow
commercial standards (as they have with FM, NTSC for ATV, etc. -- it's been a
_looonnng_ time since ham radio was _setting_ the standard, although the APRS
guys do like to point out that a lot of commercial systems today still aren't
as good as they are).

---Joel