5 ms·

Quite interesting is the bit about hiring the "former lead of GNU Radio" who had experienced pain in getting closed/proprietary hardware things to be useful. I

Quite interesting is the bit about hiring the "former lead of GNU Radio" who had experienced pain in getting closed/proprietary hardware things to be useful. I wonder if this will lead to more open platforms. If for no other reason, that bit makes the article worth reading.

bsder 8y ago
> Quite interesting is the bit about hiring the "former lead of GNU Radio" who had experienced pain in getting closed/proprietary hardware things to be useful. I wonder if this will lead to more open platforms. If for no other reason, that bit makes the article worth reading. This makes me more worried, not less. The reason why you couldn't repurpose those things targeted at "specific technologies" is that they were engineered for purpose. You don't want a general "radio decoder". You want a 4G modem. You don't wan't a wideband ADC--you want low power for battery usage so you want to narrow the bandwidth as much as possible. You are willing to give up generality in order to get a couple more dB in order to increase your range by another couple miles, etc. The problem is that it is so expensive to do your own chip that everybody tries to shoehorn their solution into something that exists in volume but really isn't quite right simply to avoid that expense. If you want to fix electronics, find a way to make VLSI fabrication cost $500 and have a 5 day turnaround.
- Animats 8y ago
  You don't want a general "radio decoder". You want a 4G modem. That's consumer products. DoD wants generality even if it costs more. The electronics industry ignores what DoD wants because DoD won't buy a million parts a month. That's been going on for a long time. It really upset some USAF generals in the 1980s; they were used to driving the industry, not following it. It's gotten worse since, because the center of the electronics industry has moved to Asia. This project is a niche thing for military short-run production. That's fine. There may be commercial spinoffs. But it's aimed at DoD's needs.
  - mhneu 8y ago
    Why does DoD want generality?
    - moftz 8y ago
      It's cheaper for contractors to slap together a bunch of COTS stuff and get good functionality for a "low price" versus building the perfect system from all-in-one designs. The manufacturers aren't going to make military spec all-in-one components because the military isn't buying that much compared to the commercial market so the manufacturers aren't going to invest the time and money into something that isn't going to sell volume. Even if they would make these parts, they are going to cost a lot more than what it would cost to design a slightly more complex, less integrated system. Everyone is better off with more general parts. More components in a system also allow the designer to swap portions out for newer designs as time goes on where as an all-in-one design is going to require a lot of NRE to update.
    - sbierwagen 8y ago
      Military radios are unlike civilian radios in that they have to transmit and receive on a really wide range of frequencies. The Wikipedia article on the AN/PRC-152 handheld radio claims it can receive from 30 to 870 MHz. (As of 2014, they cost $13,000 each, in a tiny production run of 1500 units https://www.militaryaerospace.com/articles/2014/08/air-force-radios.html https://www.militaryaerospace.com/articles/2014/08/air-force...) The military also wants the ability to change waveforms and protocols on the fly to avoid detection, another thing civilian radios never need. They're trying to replace all their current radios with the Joint Tactical Radio System, which is the usual defense procurement boondoggle. Billions spent, not much produced: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/how-to-blow-6-billion-on-a-tech-project/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/how-t... https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/03/the-armys-costly-quest-for-the-perfect-radio-continues/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/03/the-a... >The final contract for Rifleman Radios, awarded to Thales and Harris, was for up to $3.9 billion to deliver 193,276 more radios. That amounts to around $20,000 per radio, including accessories and support; in 2014, the military expected the Rifleman Radio to cost about $5,600 per unit. The Manpack radios were expected in 2014 to cost about $72,000; the actual line item for Manpacks under the 2017 budget was $114.9 million for 1,459 radios; that's nearly $78,000 and does not include the maintenance, accessories, and services. That's not exactly the kind of cost savings one would expect from a commodity, standards-based system.
- mcbits 8y ago
  Personally I'd rather have a 4G modem that can I can reprogram for something useful after my phone is obsolete, but I'll take the special purpose chip if it's cheaper. What I don't want is a general purpose SDR that's been artificially nerfed to provide only 4G while 90% of the cost is in licensing.
- someguydave 8y ago
  >If you want to fix electronics, find a way to make VLSI fabrication cost $500 and have a 5 day turnaround. Agreed. The root problem is that producing chips has become so expensive and proprietary that it has become extremely centralized. I would bet that no more than a few hundred people decide the big design questions of the chips in nearly all computers produced today.
  - slededit 8y ago
    It's worse than that. As a new player I can't even get my calls answered.
    - someguydave 8y ago
      How much did you pay for the VLSI software tooling?
      - slededit 8y ago
        In our case we're an FPGA shop looking to transition. There really needs to be a support group for people like us. We have a hard time figuring out what's even feasible.
        bsder 8y ago
        There used to be companies like that. Unfortunately, the market for that is so small that it simply isn't worth it and they all died.
        slededit 8y ago
        The difference these days is that with the death of Dennard scaling and Moore's law there's a place now for customized hardware. You really can beat Intel and even NVidia now for specialized workloads with FPGAs. Of course you'd be even better with an ASIC which is why we're leaning that way.
- freyir 8y ago
  > You don't want a general "radio decoder". You want a 4G modem Might we not want both, for different purposes? Software-defined radio won't match the performance or efficiency of specialized RF hardware, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have any utility.
- sitkack 8y ago
  There are things (anti-things?) you want and there are the things the market provides. https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/analog-devices-inc/AD9361BBCZ/AD9361BBCZ-ND/4439647 https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/analog-devices-inc... The AD9361 is exactly that all purpose programmable radio. http://www.analog.com/en/products/rf-microwave/integrated-transceivers-transmitters-receivers/wideband-transceivers-ic/ad9361.html http://www.analog.com/en/products/rf-microwave/integrated-tr... https://zeptobars.com/en/read/AD9361-SDR-Analog-Devices-DAC-ADC-65nm https://zeptobars.com/en/read/AD9361-SDR-Analog-Devices-DAC-...
  - bsder 8y ago
    With a receive and transmit current in the range of 1/4 to 1/2 an ampere. Not going to make many portable radios out of that, methinks.
    - sitkack 8y ago
      That is what RF amplifiers are for. The output current for an IC that already does SDR is huge. I think you are at the limits of what you can reliably critique.
- outworlder 8y ago
  Why don't you want a software defined radio?

bsder 8y ago

> Quite interesting is the bit about hiring the "former lead of GNU Radio" who had experienced pain in getting closed/proprietary hardware things to be useful. I wonder if this will lead to more open platforms. If for no other reason, that bit makes the article worth reading. This makes me more worried, not less. The reason why you couldn't repurpose those things targeted at "specific technologies" is that they were engineered for purpose. You don't want a general "radio decoder". You want a 4G modem. You don't wan't a wideband ADC--you want low power for battery usage so you want to narrow the bandwidth as much as possible. You are willing to give up generality in order to get a couple more dB in order to increase your range by another couple miles, etc. The problem is that it is so expensive to do your own chip that everybody tries to shoehorn their solution into something that exists in volume but really isn't quite right simply to avoid that expense. If you want to fix electronics, find a way to make VLSI fabrication cost $500 and have a 5 day turnaround.

Animats 8y ago
You don't want a general "radio decoder". You want a 4G modem. That's consumer products. DoD wants generality even if it costs more. The electronics industry ignores what DoD wants because DoD won't buy a million parts a month. That's been going on for a long time. It really upset some USAF generals in the 1980s; they were used to driving the industry, not following it. It's gotten worse since, because the center of the electronics industry has moved to Asia. This project is a niche thing for military short-run production. That's fine. There may be commercial spinoffs. But it's aimed at DoD's needs.
- mhneu 8y ago
  Why does DoD want generality?
  - moftz 8y ago
    It's cheaper for contractors to slap together a bunch of COTS stuff and get good functionality for a "low price" versus building the perfect system from all-in-one designs. The manufacturers aren't going to make military spec all-in-one components because the military isn't buying that much compared to the commercial market so the manufacturers aren't going to invest the time and money into something that isn't going to sell volume. Even if they would make these parts, they are going to cost a lot more than what it would cost to design a slightly more complex, less integrated system. Everyone is better off with more general parts. More components in a system also allow the designer to swap portions out for newer designs as time goes on where as an all-in-one design is going to require a lot of NRE to update.
  - sbierwagen 8y ago
    Military radios are unlike civilian radios in that they have to transmit and receive on a really wide range of frequencies. The Wikipedia article on the AN/PRC-152 handheld radio claims it can receive from 30 to 870 MHz. (As of 2014, they cost $13,000 each, in a tiny production run of 1500 units https://www.militaryaerospace.com/articles/2014/08/air-force-radios.html https://www.militaryaerospace.com/articles/2014/08/air-force...) The military also wants the ability to change waveforms and protocols on the fly to avoid detection, another thing civilian radios never need. They're trying to replace all their current radios with the Joint Tactical Radio System, which is the usual defense procurement boondoggle. Billions spent, not much produced: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/how-to-blow-6-billion-on-a-tech-project/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/how-t... https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/03/the-armys-costly-quest-for-the-perfect-radio-continues/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/03/the-a... >The final contract for Rifleman Radios, awarded to Thales and Harris, was for up to $3.9 billion to deliver 193,276 more radios. That amounts to around $20,000 per radio, including accessories and support; in 2014, the military expected the Rifleman Radio to cost about $5,600 per unit. The Manpack radios were expected in 2014 to cost about $72,000; the actual line item for Manpacks under the 2017 budget was $114.9 million for 1,459 radios; that's nearly $78,000 and does not include the maintenance, accessories, and services. That's not exactly the kind of cost savings one would expect from a commodity, standards-based system.
mcbits 8y ago
Personally I'd rather have a 4G modem that can I can reprogram for something useful after my phone is obsolete, but I'll take the special purpose chip if it's cheaper. What I don't want is a general purpose SDR that's been artificially nerfed to provide only 4G while 90% of the cost is in licensing.
someguydave 8y ago
>If you want to fix electronics, find a way to make VLSI fabrication cost $500 and have a 5 day turnaround. Agreed. The root problem is that producing chips has become so expensive and proprietary that it has become extremely centralized. I would bet that no more than a few hundred people decide the big design questions of the chips in nearly all computers produced today.
- slededit 8y ago
  It's worse than that. As a new player I can't even get my calls answered.
  - someguydave 8y ago
    How much did you pay for the VLSI software tooling?
    - slededit 8y ago
      In our case we're an FPGA shop looking to transition. There really needs to be a support group for people like us. We have a hard time figuring out what's even feasible.
      - bsder 8y ago
        There used to be companies like that. Unfortunately, the market for that is so small that it simply isn't worth it and they all died.
        slededit 8y ago
        The difference these days is that with the death of Dennard scaling and Moore's law there's a place now for customized hardware. You really can beat Intel and even NVidia now for specialized workloads with FPGAs. Of course you'd be even better with an ASIC which is why we're leaning that way.
freyir 8y ago
> You don't want a general "radio decoder". You want a 4G modem Might we not want both, for different purposes? Software-defined radio won't match the performance or efficiency of specialized RF hardware, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have any utility.
sitkack 8y ago
There are things (anti-things?) you want and there are the things the market provides. https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/analog-devices-inc/AD9361BBCZ/AD9361BBCZ-ND/4439647 https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/analog-devices-inc... The AD9361 is exactly that all purpose programmable radio. http://www.analog.com/en/products/rf-microwave/integrated-transceivers-transmitters-receivers/wideband-transceivers-ic/ad9361.html http://www.analog.com/en/products/rf-microwave/integrated-tr... https://zeptobars.com/en/read/AD9361-SDR-Analog-Devices-DAC-ADC-65nm https://zeptobars.com/en/read/AD9361-SDR-Analog-Devices-DAC-...
- bsder 8y ago
  With a receive and transmit current in the range of 1/4 to 1/2 an ampere. Not going to make many portable radios out of that, methinks.
  - sitkack 8y ago
    That is what RF amplifiers are for. The output current for an IC that already does SDR is huge. I think you are at the limits of what you can reliably critique.
outworlder 8y ago
Why don't you want a software defined radio?