On Thu, 5 Mar 2015, gareth wrote:

An idea that I fielded some time ago, but did not pursue because
of a lack of support, was that we should encourage homebrewing, not
by a range of disparate kits, but by having a set of standard biscuits,
each with a defined input / output interface such that radios from
the very simple to the very complex could be assembled from
a selection of such biscuits.

But modules are too diverse. Yes, they will have an output, and often an
input, but there may be a third input, and this one might need more
controls and that one less.

Building as modules makes sense, because then it's easier to scrap part of
it if it doesn't work, or reuse it in some other project. But buying off
the shelf modules, I don't see that happening much.


International Crystal in the US used to offer a wide variety of modules
over time. Not just the solid state ones in the late sixties and early
seventies, which were pretty generic (a crystal oscillator, a mixer, a
wideband amplifier, a low power output amplifier), but earlier on, enough
modules to build up complete units. But really, they seemed more about
building up units as described by the company, and it ended up very
costly. It wasn't like trying new things by mixing and matching modules.

Or, there was a company in Germany (was it KVG of filter fame, or a
separate company, I can't remember) that sold some nice preassembled
boards in the early seventies. But those weren't a single stage per
board, they were things like an SSB exciter IF strip (or maybe receive
too). They were very interesting at the time, but also very expensive by
the time they came over to North America.

The job of Modules were taken over by ICs in the seventies. And you see
the same thing. Either something very exotic that could be used for only
one thing, or something very generic, which didn't do that much in itself.



Now, it is possible that with the onset of SDR, that such an
approach would be obselescent, but SDR itself is already notorious
for being an off-the-shelf Cheque Book (CB) approach both for
the hardware and also the software.

THings called SDRs seem to vary. There are shortwave radios out there
that use very flexible ICs, which requires a computer to set up, but I'm
not sure how much you can define. There's the Eton/Grundig G8. One could
modify it for your own microprocessor and get more steps of selectivity,
for instance, but I don't think you can do anything to get SSB on the
receiver, it's not about programming the whole thing.

SOmething like those DTV dongles seem to be more programmable, I don't
know if the A/D conversion is in there or what. But, one now has to learn
so much to program them, and be able to make them do other things.

I think for most, many SDRs are about letting someone else define things.

Michael