I love reading Freedom to Tinker. It covers lots of different high level happenings that could affect the large scale of one’s right to tinker with the stuff they own. This
time Professor Felton covers radios. He gives a very niec sum up here:
Smart radios are a sleeper technology. They’re being developed right now; they’ll have a huge impact; but they’re not getting anywhere near the attention they deserve.
Smart radios rely on computer processing power, rather than simple analog circuits, to extract information from the electromagnetic spectrum. This simple idea has profound implications for wireless communication, implications that we are only just beginning to understand.
The implications of using software (since general purpose hardware is so powerful these days) to handle radio signal processing is really huge. I remember working on the analog stuff back in college and going, ‘Can’t I play with this on the computer and not pay a huge sum out of my pocket?’ (Back then the answer was no)
