I had to blog this news since I believe this will revolutionize communications in SAR for us in a few years…
Wired and Engadget covered this.
Matt Ettus is making an open source universal software radio that can receive and transmissions across all spectrums. This applies to all the radio frequencies we use such as GPS, CDMA, GSM, EVDO, WIFI, bluetooth, etc. The revolutionary thing is that it’s cheap and we now we don’t have to care about how the airways are segmented by the FCC. You can conceivably receive (or broadcast) on all frequencies, simultaneously. The fact that it’s open, means that some clever engineer can come along and solve some problems for us in emergency management by coordinating all of our frequencies on one universal software so we can all communicate despite using different radios. This is already possible, but hasn’t been cheap or free.
But I’m working on a really cool mash-up for playing helmet cam video synchronized with Google Maps track playback. Here is a screen grab. We’re moving a bit slowly since there are so many elements to doing this. But the idea is to make a capability that anyone can use. So we’re building and getting ready to present at a couple conferences.