Ham Radio and Advances in the Analog Field

When I was working for a living, one of my favorite trade magazines was Electronics Design News "EDN". There was always a new chip or application or a nifty circuit that some PhD snargled up (technical term there) that looked interesting. Our engineers were pretty savvy fellows and some of their ideas appeared in EDN while I was there. The December 2012 copy of EDN carried a reference to an article that describes the development of the SDR, or Software Defined  Radio, in which signal processing from RF amplification, to signal mixing, to the final audio output is handled digitally. Everything is done in a computer, to put it simply. Well, almost everything. The "Flex" radio system came on line in about 2002 and technical advances since then have allowed the design and production of some pretty fantastic transceivers. For some interesting reading and functional a block diagram, take a look at the EDN article here.