🎓 Dr. Freemo 🇳🇱 @freemo@social.cleverlibre.org

@thor yup, anytime you need high-speed very accurate signal a PLL is usually your goto

@thor anyone can make an RF transmitter or receiver that (barely) works... the trick is making a good and legal one.

I made a transmitter once when I was like 12 out of a 555 timer. It worked on AM, you could hear it on the radio from a few feet away... but being a very unstable square wave it had so many harmonics you could pretty much tune up anywhere and still hear it :)

@thor There are tons of designs and what you choose depends on a lot of features.. the best of the more commonly used designs are phase locked loops. this is usually what your cell phone is using to generate the carrier.

@thor If you arent transmitting where is the fun :)

But yea if its a receiver only of course it can be as dirty as you like, and yea some of that may never reach a persons ears depending on the details.

@thor depends, just because something may work doesnt mean its legal.. you get distortion in your carrier signal it may start emitting energy into frequencies or bands you dont want and interfererence often means lack of FCC compliance... but we are talking very generally, it depends on what sort we are talking about, how much, and what the power spectrum looks like.

@thor yup, as a general rule when the length of something approches or exceeds the wavelengtht hen you need to treat it as a transmission line. Since microwave has such a small wavelength almost everything is a TL

@thor rf is usually analog at high enough frequencies a lot of edge cases emerge

@thor Most of the stuff I do combines digital with analog... lots of RF based stuff.

@thor Ive done a good deal of EE work, always happy to chat abou tit

@thor The opinion of the chip makers has no real relevance in my opinion. It is what the EE use and like that matters and they almost exclusively use software availible on linux (though there are windows versions too so meets that criteria anyway).

The truth is, Eagle / Kicad are easily the vast majority of what EEs use, even more so if the intent is to share source files.

@thor I do pretty extensive EE.. and while your right there is some windows only software, no one ever uses it outside of maybe tight nit company teams... Kicad or Eagle are pretty much the standard go-to in the industry and both are free (though only kicad is truely OSS and unrestricted). Both run on linux though.

@thor No arguments there... anything wrt media generation is going to be a mac thing in most industries.

@thor that sounds fair.

@thor STL, OBJ.. its been a while since i had to share a 3D mesh but I recall there being quite a few platform independent formats.

@thor I've personally never noticed latency on audio, but that doesnt mean much.

@thor Anyone interested in working with the rest of the world will usually use standard or free file formats.. cant exactly collaborate when you need the exact same software out of a list of 20 options each one not being compatible with the other.

@thor Yea I agree that if your an audio/video guy linux is a bit weak. Always served my purposes but im not really on the high end of that spectrum. In that regard a preference for other platform makes some sense. Though, like I said, running windows and mac software on linux is pretty trivial so personally if i ever had to I'd probably still be running linux.

@thor I find windows software to be horrible personally, but to each their own. Nice thing about linux is you can run almost any windows software better than you can on windows sometimes.

@thor yea i too like how mac is POSIX based and its one reason i can enjoy it... That said i will take linux over mac personally any day just because I prefer something more close to standard.. I got tired of wrestling linux apps to work in the non-standard mac environment.

If I use one its usually because a job/client gave me the choice between a mac and windows.

@thor Sgreed if you could run the software seperately it would be a much more reasonable deal all around.