Speed of Demodulating an FM stream in software

[fuzzy_bunny]

Just for grins and giggles, I compared the speed of processing in software the demodulation that we do in hardware in a traditional radio.

There is a small delay, but I am going to guess that it is on the order of 1/10th to 1/20th of a second betwixt the audio coming out of a traditional radio to the output of an SDR setup with a ~$20 or less dongle.

For someone who was brought up on 2 Mhz 48K byte computers, this is just freaking amazing.

I remember, for the aforementioned specs of the Atari 800, it took every ounce of processing power, including turning off the video chip (about a 20% boost in performance), and everything the poor little thing had to render a 2-3 second clip of the Kinks "You really got me now", and even then, it was a far cry from broadcast or cd quality audio.

In retrospect, I should have forecast some of the capabilities of modern computers and modern networks. Realistically, networks have become part of our computer systems. Without a network to stream information from the web or your video server to your ROKU or XBMC pc, the capabilities of our computational power is very limited.

The amount of collaboration and innovation that even the community of Hak5 is able to produce through the web site and the weekly I-casts is nothing short of amazing. People from all over the country, or the world, are able to work together, with only language being a barrier, but increasingly, the web is making the world speak English. This trumps every social influence that people or cultures may claim. They may have localized languages, but the web speaks English, and English's place as a world language is all but guaranteed by computer networks, the Internet, specifically. I realise that TCP/IP cares nothing about the human language it transports, but as the innovation in networks and computer science is mainly a product of the US and our economic allies in Japan, Taiwan, China, and the EU, and RFC's ( the backbone of internet/TCP/IP innovation ) are written and distributed in English, I pretty much see English as being the uber-language of the future.

My forefathers/mothers spoke German, Norwegian, English ( British English ), etc., but by the fourth or fifth generation, the only thing that matters is old traditional recipes made on the holidays. The rest of the culture has been absorbed. So will it be with our newest immigrants. So it will be with the world as they get absorbed into the world wide web. Many cultures, such as the Japanese and the Chinese and various Jewish and Moslem countries will always preserve their neighbourhood tongues... But they will also speak English, and speaking in English will become the international standard of communication through the influence of Internet Anarchy.

If tracked back far enough, the Roman Empire is still alive and well, but wearing different clothes. It is more of something that we all take for granted. Roads ( arguably, an early network, still important in conjunction with the information network ), indoor plumbing ( arguably, an early crap network, sort of like Facebook ), bridges ( ok, more network analogies... ) our calendar and hours, our numerals, all have Roman origins. This is similar to how I perceive English's role in the future, something taken for granted, that people don't even think about.

I hope I have not offended anyone. If I have, please accept my semi humble apologies. I don't intentionally try to offend anyone.

It seems, like sarcasm, to be a natural talent I possess.

-Fuzzy Bunny