OLPC hardware: what if there was an SDR modem / chipset?

[david at lang.hm]

On Mon, 25 Jan 2010, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 6:05 PM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton
> <lkcl at lkcl.net> wrote:
>
>>  the key questions to be asking are: in light of the massive volumes
>> involved with OLPC XOs, is SDR worth pursuing, given all the
>> development costs, but given all the benefits especially where SDR can
>> be re-programmed to do "whatever" in bands where licensing and
>> regulatory approval is _not_ required, on a per-country basis?
>
> bearing in mind that the particular R.F. front-end transceiver chips
> i'm looking at, one can do 600mhz to 6ghz and the other can do 100mhz
> to 6ghz.  there's another one which can do 80mhz to around 5ghz or so
> i believe, but it's "receive only" but has far superior
> signal-to-noise ratio and is accompanied by a far superior A2D-USB2
> converter.

please point me at these magic chips, I would like to use them in my own 
projects. I'll bet that these chips can operate in that band, but not 
throughout the band without changing external components.

David Lang