One of the most powerful forces in the universe isn't mechanical or physical -- it's psychological. I'm referring to motivation. Whether you're dealing with a design group, a sports team, a classroom full of students or kids at home, it's utterly amazing what a motivated individual or group of individuals can accomplish. Sometimes these people work within the framework of a hobby and don't get paid in any tangible way. They achieve great things for the pure enjoyment of the effort and the feeling of accomplishment.

We've seen this motivational effect at work in the high-tech industry many times over. An example that comes immediately to mind is operating systems, where Linux has moved from an academic curiosity to a serious OS with support from hundreds of thousands of programmers. Their combined efforts have resulted in all sorts of utility programs, applications and even realtime variants, leading to an entire subindustry by itself.

Such a self-motivated effort is starting up in the DSP world, and you might want to get involved. A group of ham-radio operators have started up a web-based group that is investigating the feasibility and mechanisms for jointly designing a software-defined, DSP-based satellite radio. To check out some of the most recent postings in the group, go to www.qth.net and then select the list named "dsp-radio."

To get a better idea of what the group is up to, here's a summary from one of their early postings: With the lack of an open-source software-defined DSP satellite radio being commercially manufacturerd, is it possible for a group of hams to design and build such a radio that would be easily duplicated in kit form and encourage experimentation? Perhaps it could even introduce hams to satellite operation or high-speed digital satellite operation.

The group has been in existence for a couple of months, and not long ago one of the group members, Darrell Bellerive (Canadian call sign VE7CLA) consolidated into one document the ideas floating around in various postings. It's what he describes as a cross between a design spec and a discussion paper. You can check it out at http://www3.telus.net/ve7cla/Spec_r00.txt.

The document, more than 80k bytes long, is obviously too extensive to include here. But if you read through it, you'll see that the group is very serious about their work and they know what they're talking about. Towards the goal of a radio that anybody can build and modify, they want to work as much as possible with off-the-shelf hardware with a modular design: a motherboard with pluggable DSP, CPU and RF modules. And although the framework would allow virtually any application on any band, the main purpose of the project appears to be a radio capable of operation with high-speed digital satellites.

This project strikes me as quite exciting and unusually sophisticated for a group of hobbyists, but I'll bet they can pull it off. Nonetheless, the group is looking for people to get involved and participate, and I'm sure that a few ChipCenter readers might want to jump in. Certainly there's plenty of high-power talent reading this column, and the dsp-radio group could benefit from your expertise. And I suspect anyone who joins in will find the project enormous fun. The enthusiasm of the group will rub off on you in no time at all.

But I also want to encourage DSP vendors to get involved. Unlike a software-only group project, or a traditional ham-radio homebrew project where all you need are some transistors and passives or a few common ICs, this one requires a more serious commitment of funds on the part of the participants. Playing around with DSP requires, at the very least, evaluation boards, which although they sell for a couple of hundred dollars, aren't within the "toy" budget of everyone in the dsp-radio group.

I would like to see -- no, I actively invite -- all major DSP suppliers to get involved. Make sample parts readily available to the group. Supply a few evaluation boards at no cost. Send a few CD-ROMs with development software their way. The cost to you, the manufacturer, is almost nothing. But the payback could be enormous, as your marketing department will undoubtedly agree. These companies won't necessarily want to distribute freebie hardware and software to every single member of the group, but the dsp-radio leaders would be able to help vendors find the key contributors who could benefit most from such donations.

I agree that DSP vendors won't get involved out of pure altruism. But they can gain a lot. For one, they're always looking for engineering talent, and this group will be a magnet for people who know their way around DSP and RF. They might not be looking for jobs, but aren't those often the best "finds"? Even if suppliers don't come away with any hires, it behooves them to make sure that design engineers in this group are intimately familiar with their products. If Supplier X makes chips and development tools readily available, and those chips get selected for the dsp-radio, then a large group of engineers will become vary familiar with those devices and will have a natural inclination to migrate towards them in their day jobs.

I would make one final request of DSP vendors -- that they assign one of their tech-support engineers to join and participate in the list. It's very little effort on their part, but I suspect such an action would save this group many hours of debate and struggle by having an expert on hand who knows a given device family inside-out. Besides, that support staff might pick up a few tricks, pointers or unconventional ideas by watching what members of the group are up to, as well.

Independent of vendor participation, I have no doubt that this group will come up with some exciting concepts and designs. Software-defined radios are an extremely hot topic, and the shape of radio as we know it will change dramatically over the next several years. Here's one way to get personally involved and keep up with the bleeding edge, even if it's not part of your day job. These hams are a dedicated bunch, which I've learned over the years from personal experience -- I've had the benefit from the extensive knowledge of fellow hams since my high-school days (I currently hold the call AA1MI). They're also very bright. Combine those traits and we're bound to see some great work. Join in with the group, even if you're not a ham -- you'll learn a lot, but it will never have seemed like so much fun!

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