On Wed, 5 Jan 2011, Joel Koltner wrote:

"K7ITM" wrote in message
...
As you think about all this stuff, it becomes easy to see why nobody
has yet built the perfect receiver. ;-)

Hey, I was at a conference some five years or so ago now where some
high-level muckety-muck from Intel got up there and claimed that within a few
years we're be connecting antennas straight to ADCs and radios would
henceforth be 100% digital... :-)

No, that just means the potential is there for "the perfect receiver".
Even if the hardware is "perfect", the software still has to be written.

Of course, it is a bit easier to build a good radio when you're operating in,
e.g., the cell phone bands and by law you control the spectrum (no big
intereferes), you manage the power of all the transmitters dynamically
(limited self-interference), etc.!


Like that classic FM broadcast receiver in the old GE Transistor Manual.
A tunnel diode acting as an oscillator and mixer, it drops to an IF about
200KHz, where there is a pulse counting detector. It works because one
can live with the image frequencies, and one knows where all the wanted
signals will be.

Michael VE2BVW