Interesting how the US goes absolutely ballistic about some random dude violating the "Computer Security Act" on a small scale, but didn't react at all to this massive, incredibly impactful, attack.
it didn't impact Americans. it impacted us Europeans but at the time this went down we were too dependent on Russia's cheap gas (and, frankly, lacked the military power) to raise the appropriate level of stink.
Hell we let Russia freely execute dissidents (Skripal or the Berlin Tiergarten murder come to my mind) and tolerated a land-grab war by little green men in 2014. Either of these actions would have warranted serious consequences, the Crimea/Donbas grab would be a casus belli if you ask me. But again, we were too busy sucking Putin off for cheap gas.
The US does not want to go to full scale, open war with Russia.
So the US will downplay or ignore some amount of aggression from Russia to do so.
If the US wanted to go to war with Russia, we would be playing up some rather minor thing, like sending a missile system into "Europe" or something.
When that Ukrainian SAM fell in Poland and killed a farmer, there was a late night emergency meeting between a lot of very important people from NATO countries to decide WTF to do. If the west wanted to fight Russia, that meeting would have resulted in an Article 5 declaration of some sort.
Russia is behind the sabotage/blowing up of a Czech Republic arms depot. If the west wanted to go to war with Russia, that could have also been an instigating event.
Russia will continue to get passes for "minor" acts of war as long as the west does not agree with sending citizens to die in a war.
That we don't equip Ukraine with more than enough war material to do whatever they are capable of, however, is fucking stupid.
"Some" is an understatement lol. Here in Germany 3.800 (!) wind turbines lost remote control (and thus were forced offline) until the terminals could be changed because their command uplink was via Viasat.
I think that's probably true, but for learning stuff I think an oscilloscope is way better than a multi-meter and the cost is prohibitive so I love the flea scope to give to noobs.
I am also very much in the belief system that you should not buy an expensive tool before you are frustrated with a cheap one, most of the time people get into random hobbies and bow out six months later with way too much crap on their hands, and often time tools are more for show than for real world use.
So the situation would be: you create a setup, buy devices and then they randomly shutdown as they pull too much current? How is that better than having a well defined standard that ensures compatibility?
The device first negotiates a certain current capability. If a device explicitly asks for 15W and then goes on to draw 60W, you can hardly call it a "random" shutdown: it is clearly misbehaving, so it is best to shut it down to prevent further damage.
All mosfets are like that.
The marketing folksbL at Toshiba just were not able get it removed, or they have had one too many complaint from folks running them near the absolute max while not cooling them properly.
The popular IC-7300 transceiver from Icom does that.
Receiver samples the whole band and does downconversion in the digital domain (DDC) and same for the transmitter (DUC).
On the hobbyist side there is the TRX Wolf by UA3REO.
Sure, just do the Zeta SDR schematic in reverse, but like others have said you'd have to figure out the rest of the chain as well as a tone of filtering. I've transmitted with direct digital synth chips as well as rpitx which is literally bit-banging RF off of a pin on a raspberry pi with NTP sync even. Again, still had to do a lot of filtering, but with wsprrypi I was able to be heard one time in New Zealand from Ohio, USA without any amplification.
Naturally there needs to be filtering and some sort of analog frontend.
My main point was that mainstream rigs now do direct sampling, instead of zero-if or superhet with dsp IF.
And WSPR sure is magic, people do thousands of km with it off an rp2040 gpio pin.
I'm not sure this is what you have in mind as far as "mainstream" rigs or architecture, but the FTDX-101D main receiver is a "narrowband SDR" system, as Yaesu describes it. Signal is downconverted through an analog chain including a narrow crystal filter before it reaches the 18 bit A/D+FPGA. And yes, it does perform very well, currently at the top of the "Sherwood" Third-Order Dynamic Range ranking, where it's been for about 5 years now.
If I'm interpreting your view correctly, then I share it: there is a lot of performance to be had with a well designed analog front end, and the specs of the digital parts can be quite modest and still perform extremely well.
Quite a few radios are direct-- no intermediate frequency, just a set of band selection filters. The direct route does not quite hit the absolute state of the art in dynamic range, but it's close. IC-7300, IC-7610, Elecraft K4, etc. all have this design. I wouldn't be too surprised if one more generation of ADC improvements take it over the line. Certainly there is a lot more engineering might being put into better ADC designs than there is for superhet radios.
Beyond being simpler on the analog side the direct conversion route makes spectrum/waterfall views of the whole band trivial. In theory radios could use this wide bandwidth for improved impulse blanker performance, but I'm not sure which if any do.
Some (like the flex radio, and Elecraft) will do multiple in-one-band simultaneous receive with on each ADC using it... but (other than flex perhaps) the advantages of direct converting a whole band are currently under-utilized. Once they are I doubt there will be much interest in superhet even if the dynamic range isn't quite matched.
I think the future of radio designs though will be finding ways to move the RF portion closer to the antenna(s), away from RF-noisy buildings, and avoiding expensive, lossy, and annoying coax runs.
Interestingly DECT NR+ is a 5G standard on dedicated spectrum and has been designed to be a mesh from the start.
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