From: John Ackermann N8UR (srkv.wwbm@labri.fr)
Date: Fri Nov 16 2001 - 21:31:49 EET
Hi Nick --
I think there are two answers to the question. The first is that the
development team is a small group of folks who came to us with the project
and offered to do it on the condition that it would be managed on a very
controlled basis; they are RF and digital design professionals who have
worked together before on a number of projects and knew from experience
that they didn't want to deal with a large development group.
The second part of the answer is that when the radio is available, so will
be all the source code and design information, with the possible exception
of some small bits of the frequency-hopping algorithm that U.S. regulators
won't allow to be published. All the software will be under the GPL.
We seriously doubt that it will be feasible for hams to homebrew the
hardware because of the complexity and component density of the boards
(very fine pitch surface mount components with hundreds of leads,
multi-layer boards, etc.), though the schematics will be available if
anyone wants to try. We *do* expect that folks will be able to modify the
radio's software to make it operate in different ways. By the way, the
radio uses a Motorola 68030-class CPU and the operating system and network
stack are based on Xinu (but pretty heavily modified).
John
--On Friday, November 16, 2001 2:12 PM -0500 Nick Papadonis
<fvklnns@mail.dy.fi> wrote:
> John,
>
> Where is the repository of information on this project? Is the
> firmware code under version control? Maybe something like this would
> allow others to help? Maybe without hardware this can't happen.
>
> - Nick
>
> John Ackermann N8UR <msb@trump.net.au> writes:
>
>> Just a quick followup re the status of the TAPR radio project -- it's
>> not dead, but it's certainly been a lot slower-going than any of us
>> had hoped. After Motorola obsoleted most of the major chips on the
>> digital board, the volunteer team did a redesign and have now more
>> than made up the lost ground (i.e., we now have the digital (baseband)
>> side of the radio substantially debugged and functional). Work
>> continues on the RF board and the software development.
>>
>>
>> It's been a long haul, and it may be quite a bit longer before we have
>> a finished product, but the project does continue.
> -
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>
---- John Ackermann N8UR objclhb.mzwmg@nat-tor.aster.pl http://www.febo.com President, TAPR ntdbkuw@arovit.dk http://www.tapr.org- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-hams" in the body of a message to terhi.victor@logonet.com More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
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