Are you a computer simulation?

Someone emailed me about my webpage at: http://www.philcovington.com/comp.html to ask if I really believed we are living in a computer simulation. He was referring to the paper by Bostrom titled "Are You Living In A Computer Simulation? ". No, I do not believe we are living in a computer simulation. It is an interesting paper though.

I think that Ed Fredkin's Digital Philosophy (http://www.digitalphilosophy.org) is probably closer to what underlies reality.

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History of HPSDR Mercury and Quick Silver

History of HPSDR Mercury and Quick Silver Philip Covington, N8VB Early HPSDR and XYLO In 2005 I started a High Performance SDR (HPSDR) project which was to consist of a motherboard carrying a FPGA/USB 2.0 interface and power supply with the provision for plug in modules through 40 pin headers. I had planned a narrow band high dynamic range module based on a QSD/DDS/PCM4202 audio ADC and a wide bandwidth module based on a high speed 16 bit ADC: http://www.philcovington.com/SDR/PICS/HPSDR_FPGA_USB_Board_top1_800600.jpg http://www.philcovington.com/SDR/PICS/HPSDR_FPGA_USB_Board_top4.jpg I soon selected the LTC2208 ADC from Linear Technology. A representative from Linear Technology came across my blog ( http://pcovington.blogspot.com/ ) and offered evaluation boards and samples to support the project. At about the same time my HPSDR project came about, Phil Harman, VK6APH and Bill Tracey, KD5TFD were interested developing a sound card replacement to be used with the SD...

2323 Wilt

RFFE1 Why you may (or may not) need it

RFFE stands for "Radio Frequency Front End" and the "1" stands for the first version (0-62.5 MHz coverage). When I was designing the QS1R board, I had to decide whether to include bandpass filtering and RF amplification on the board. In fact the initial prototypes "RevA" included RF amplification on the QS1R board. Unlike another DDC based direct sampling receiver "Perseus", QS1R was designed to be more than a SW receiver. In addition to a SW receiver, QS1R was meant to facilitate experimentation in the RF spectrum up to at least 300 MHz. I finally settled on a 55 MHz low pass filter (which can be bypassed) and no active components in front of the ADC on QS1R. Any active devices, bandpass filters, or attenuation would be added by a separate board such as the RFFE1. The antenna that I use for my QS1R is a center fed, non-resonant dipole at 50 feet. The total wire length is about 240 feet with only about 100 feet of that running horizontally...

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