Well i'm sold, can't wait for the QSX to be released so I can really start using my AE license! Thanks!
35 karma · joined December 15, 2017
I don't think i "get" echolink. You hook up your radio to your computer (somehow? I don't know how i'd do this with a baofeng) and talk into it and then it uses the internet to send that across the world to other peoples radios who are also connected to their computer? It just feels like a discord voice chat with radios as the input/output device. Am i missing something?
I don't know exactly what i was expecting from getting the license but i will say that i didn't expect it to basically just be dominated by old conservative men who don't appreciate younger folk stepping in on their air space. I have yet to actually speak to anyone because i don't feel like there is anything i would want to say.
Part of me was excited to do things like decode ISS transmission or send digital packets around the world; but i wanted to ease into the higher cost HF equipment with a simple and cheap as chips baofeng UHF/VHF radio (i know, its garbage but i like i said i wanted to ease into the hobby) and when i discovered there was nothing to do but listen to old men rant i just shelved the radio.
I considered getting the bitX40 but never ended up doing it because i don't own the house i rent and putting an antenna up seems like a lot of work for a place i might move from soon. Admittedly maybe my problem was getting a baofeng UHF/VHF instead of something that i can plug into my computer and do digital modes with. But no one was really around to help me decide what to choose or give me insight into what i may want to do with my new AE powers.
edited my comment, thanks for the info!
So you can think of ARM as designing the engine, and the vendors as taking the engine design then adding the rest of the cars features (chassis, electronics, navigation, etc) around it, then building and selling it.
"Why don't the vendors just design their own processor to go with their own peripherals?" you might ask. Well designing a processor is MUCH harder to do well than any of the individual peripherals. There is a lot more going on with a processor and it's at least an order of magnitude more complex than any of the peripherals that go with it. But that doesn't mean it's not done; Atmel designed the AVR architecture and this is the processor architecture that dominates the Arduino world. Atmel sells microcontrollers with their AVR architecture processor and their own peripheral designs as well. But AVR is mostly 8-bit and they can't compete with the performance of ARMs 32-bit designs; which is why you see ARM is most embedded applications.
The design for the processor is made in a program that lets you "lay out" the hardware at the transistor level and specify processes for it (like a lithographic mask) but ARM never carries out these processes, these must be taken care of by a fabrication facility. Oftentimes these vendors don't even have fabs themselves, they just design the rest of the "car" and then have it fab'ed by a third party.
~A̶R̶M̶ ̶d̶o̶e̶s̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶w̶a̶n̶t̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶d̶e̶s̶i̶g̶n̶ ̶p̶e̶r̶i̶p̶h̶e̶r̶a̶l̶s̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶f̶a̶b̶r̶i̶c̶a̶t̶e̶ ̶c̶h̶i̶p̶s̶ ̶(̶i̶t̶ ̶d̶o̶e̶s̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶e̶v̶e̶n̶ ̶h̶a̶v̶e̶ ̶a̶ ̶f̶a̶b̶,̶ ̶n̶o̶r̶ ̶d̶o̶e̶s̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶w̶a̶n̶t̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶d̶e̶a̶l̶ ̶w̶i̶t̶h̶ ̶3̶r̶d̶ ̶p̶a̶r̶t̶y̶ ̶f̶a̶b̶s̶)̶.̶~ (Looks like i'm totally wrong here, also why doesn't HN have strikethrough comments implemented?). They do what they do - design processors - and they do it really well, so well in fact that vendors are more than willing to pay for a license to use their processors in their own chips so that the vendor doesn't have to deal with the headache of making a really good processor.
I want my magsafe charger, i want my displayport and ethernet port, i want my CD drive, i want to be able to replace the battery myself (done it twice), and to swap hard drives (done it four times) and RAM (once) easily, I want physical keys for escape and media buttons.
I have gone so far as to personally take out the motherboard and replace a single tanatalum capacitor with an aluminum-polymer capacitor (requiring me to scrape off some of the soldermask off so i could solder to the ground plane easier since the Al-Poly cap is much larger) because the tantalum one was causing GPU kernel panic crashes. (Big thanks to Louie Rossman for the tutorial video!)
I've brought this thing back from the brink of death many times and i will continue to do so until Apple cleans up their act and makes a true developers laptop again.
Don't mistake it with his graduate text, Advanced Semiconductor Fundamentals, though. That's also a great text, but very short and focuses almost exclusively on the quantum aspect without getting too much into the higher level meat of putting it together to form devices.
For a comprehensive guide, though, Physics of Semiconductor Devices by Simon M. Sze was my reference bible. It's big and bulky, very heavy on the first principles math and physics, and has everything from quantum to devices and variants on devices.