homebrew hardware and WiFi

Ian Stirling openmoko at mauve.plus.com
Sun Feb 18 17:24:01 CET 2007


Wolfgang S. Rupprecht wrote:
> One other hope I have is that the RF chip designers will start making
> more flexible radios.  Does a GSM/wifi/bluetooth/GPS phone really need
> 4 different RF chips and associated antennas and cabling?  Using
> software-radio techniques it might be possible to combine some of the
> hardware.

Basically - perhaps at some time in the distant future.
For the moment, basically no.
There are a large number of reasons why not - firstly, 1GHz A/D 
converter chips are both large, power-hungry, and expensive.
Secondly, processing the output from them is hard.
Thirdly, the dynamic range and intermodulation between different radio 
frequencies mean that it's even harder.




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