
Pah!
They had RFC's for Ethernet back in the 70's!
Boffins have developed a potential “universal radio receiver” that’s capable of detecting a whole range of wireless signals simultaneously. RFC_MIT A close-up of the RFC and antenna The Radio Frequency Cochlea (RFC) is an ultrabroad-band radiob embedded onto a 1.5 x 3mm silicon chip. It can receive mobile phone, GPS, FM …
Look chaps, the Nokia "charge your battery from zero point energy" article was bad enough, but...
Anyway, the source for this article appears to be
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/bio-electronics-0603.html
It contains statements like: "The chip is faster than any human-designed radio-frequency spectrum analyzer and also operates at much lower power. " and ""The more I started to look at the ear, the more I realized it's like a super radio with 3,500 parallel channels."
Those statements are perfectly reasonable. What's missing is the fact that ears and spectrum analysers are similar in some ways and different in others.
Either way, this is not a precision tuned RF receiver of any kind, and as such is never likely to be usable for any meaningful kind of RF communications. It certainly can't distinguish between (let alone actually receive and meaningfully decode) "mobile phone, GPS, FM radio, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth signals" in the way the article implies
Mind you as a cheap and cheerful wideband spectrum analyser it's kind of neat, and I wish it and its design team every success.
It's sort of like the school physics lab gadgets with a rope with multiple pendulums(?) of different lengths on them, and as you waggle the rope you can make different pendulums resonate. Except this does it with RF.
Please put a usb interface on that and let me sniff broadband! That'd be so much more fun than scanning frequencies one at a time...
Unfortunately until they get the equivalent sort of transmitter, this thing will only be halfway useful in bidirectional connections. That still leaves gps, weather sat images, tv/audio, and lots and lots of evesdropping... Neat.
As Paxman put it on University Challenge, "The human ear can hear frequencies in the range 20Hz to 20KHz. To the nearest whole number, how many octaves is that?"
...so much easier to remember with the additional context. And, I thought, a nice way of disguising a simple(?ish) maths question.