lauren@vortex.UUCP (Lauren Weinstein) (12/23/84)
While the demod/decoder pair must meet various industry specs and contain proprietary (to the companies involved) addressing, decoding, and decryption equipment, there is no reason whatsoever that the separate buffer board details shouldn't be fully public. In fact, it has been my intention all along that the buffer board, since it will almost certainly be designed largely by net people, should be a public domain design. People would be free to get the buffer boards from the mass source or build the buffer boards themselves. In most cases, I suspect, the former course will be the least expensive, but people would presumably have the choice anyway. Obviously, no details on the buffer board can be posted now, since there are NO details. Right now, I'm trying to just keep the basic aspects of the experiment running--the buffer board doesn't come into play until we know that there is going to be a production system, though I'm taking design suggestions now. Ideally, I'd like to get a group of people working on this early so that the design can be ready if/when we need it. Once again, my intention is that the buffer board, being largely (or totally) of our own design, would have its design characteristics freely known and available to all. That part of the project is pretty much fully ours from square one, and anyone should be free to fabricate that board on their own if they so choose. --Lauren--