FC project update and hardware plan

[Das Signal]

Hi everyone!

After a couple week away I'm back. SF, it's great to hear your progress
on the hardware side of things! It's also great to have Ineiev on board
(pun intended), welcome and many thanks for your help :)

I'm afraid I don't have PCB expertise myself so I can't really make a
meaningful comment on the subject. I guess the safe route is to go with
the GTA02 design -- as a end user, I wouldn't be too annoyed with a tri
band design; it'd still be better than the current dual-band specs of
the Motorola phones! And GTA02 is quite solid with all the A6 fixes in
(cf http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/GTA02_revisions). Also there seems
to be an evaluation version of PADS available here:
http://www.pads.com/downloads/pads-download-evaluation
Although I don't know much about RF design, I heard it can be tricky
(esp. impedance matching and EM compatibility stuff). So I'm more
inclined towards a direct reuse of GTA02.

As for me I still plan to perform the HR/FR/EFR/AMR testing. Before my
vacation I had started digging a bit, apparently the codec is not
directly controlled by OpenBTS but by asterisk, so that's the current
avenue of research!

--DS