Software Defined Radio, Chapter 1: The Beginning (for me)
Sometime in 2003, my boss handed me a textbook about Software Defined Radio and told me I should learn about it. The company was SAMSys Technologies, an RFID industry pioneer. I had written the firmware for many of the company's products, but they always used hardware based radios. I was a hard working professional at the top of my game, but SDR didn't click for me. At the time it was too theoretical. Without something real to poke, I got lost real fast. Another thing that happened at SAMSys was that a coworker made a sniffer for UHF RFID that allowed me to view the air interface on an o'scope (I vastly prefer the Agilent MSO with MegaZoom, which lets me capture an entire transaction and zoom in to each bit without recapturing). That tool was crazy valuable in my RFID reader development at SAMSys because it showed me both forward and reverse link traffic, and even let me see if a tag was responding. I've tried to duplicate it a few times, but ...