Ben Hammersley's got a great Gruniad piece this week about Software Defined Radio. It's so cool to watch this crawl into the public consciousness.
In a positive move, the first handheld software radio was unveiled in Washington in May. Instead of specialist radio hardware, a software radio uses a simple receiver to throw the entire contents of a range of frequencies into computer memory, where software – and not hardware – does the signal processing. Vanu Inc, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, took an ordinary, off-the-shelf Hewlett-Packard iPaq personal digital assistant and, using only a simple radio receiver and an upgrade to the Linux operating system, was able to demonstrate the device working as an FM radio.
