Signal analysis

I've not kept up with the ITX scene but I do have an old Atom based computer (N330 dual HT @ 1.6GHz) and it's amazingly gutless. I also have a very cheap Bay Trail quad core Atom based W10 laptop/tablet. It's leaps and bounds faster than that the old Atom. Like chalk and cheese. From a performance point of view, it's noticeably quicker running a .NET XNA app than a Nexus 7 running the same app compiled as a native ARM arm. So a Bay Trail Atom 1.8GHZ quad core interpreted is quicker than an ARM A9 1.3GHz quad core native. For what it's worth ;-)

Mine comes with W10 Home 32bit even though it is an x64 processor. You

convertible tablet that will run the existing software and has all the audio, USB, SSD and wifi built in, if you go for lower build quality and

However, I understand that even if W10 is free there are people who don't want it for philosophical reasons. (It's easy to turn off the telemetry and forced updates etc. but that's a digression.) I'm not bothered as W10 is just an OS and professionally I write Windows & Linux software, so I don't care. But I don't know how possible it is to boot Linux and get it working. In theory it should be trivial but UEFI secure boot and oddball hardware may have driver issues. The SDIO Wifi driver in my machine has a long story about getting it working with Linux even though driver source is available. As for the other hardware, I haven't time to play.

If you can accept the provided OS, then one of these tablets may be a cheap way to do what is needed but I can understand not wanting to use W10 or to find out if Linux will boot.

I have a cheap 7 inch Android tablet with the quad core Atom, bought in a hurry when I broke my GPS. It's surprisingly good, but I expect Intel subsidised it as part of their attack on ARM.

I think that if you steer clear of 'fancy' laptops, the drivers for Linux are no issue at all, and my experience is that Linux installers - mint in particular, have nearly got the UEFI/secure boot thing tied up.

I think Ubuntu registered itself as a 'good OS' as far as UEFI and secure boot go.

And mint uses Ubuntu underneath.

I missed that news item. The laptop was likely connected to an expensive radio receiver, but I don't recall seeing any commercial software which can do the things Spectrum Lab can do.

You may have read of AMSAT-DL's EVE experiment, in which Spectrum Lab was used to integrate the returning signal. Cool stuff.

No buts there lots of non-commercial (aka Military) software that does that kind of thing.

Ah, I didn't know that, thanks.

After further investigation I have found that Octave has a number of FFT functions as standard, I will have to find out more about what these actually do. Another learning opportunity. :-)

I know nothing about Octave but reference info for Mathematica is easy to find and often very clear, especially if you already have some idea about the underlying math.., eg. the top result for "mathematica fft":

I don't think the receiver was more than a piezo transducer connected to the soundcard. Remember that these pingers are acoustic, not electromagnetic, and operate on about 37.5 kHz, well within the bandwith of a soundcard sampling at 96 kHz.

Yes I know about those experiments, similar ones were done here at the CAMRAS dish, an astronomic dish (25m) used by radio amateurs.

ISTR that MAME and/or XMAME has options to slow the games down to their original speed if they run too fast. :-)

Wine is a virtual environment that allows you to run some DOS and Windows programs under a Linux kernel. it is NOT a CPU emulator. It takes advangage of the virtualization features of the Pentium, etc. chips to run plain-vanilla calculation code natively on the x86 CPU until a system call, I/O instruction or such occurs, then Wine is given control to handle that function. Therefore, most DOS/Windows programs run at full CPU speed under Wine.

Of course, ARM processors can't run X86 code, so you would need a full emulation of the CPU, instruction set, etc. While new ARM CPUs are pretty fast, and you could probably run some 30 year old DOS game acceptably, any serious computation code would be at a BIG disadvantage.

Jon