SpeakEasy

SpeakEasy was a United States military project to use software-defined radio technology to make it possible to communicate with over 10 different types of military radios from a single system. History "The SpectrumWare project applied a software-oriented wireless communications approach with distributed signal processing. The research direction of the SpectrumWare project was heavily influenced by two software radio efforts: the military SpeakEasy project and the commercial products of the Steinbrecher Corporation. According to Upmal and Lackey in “SPEAKeasy, the Military Software Radio” IEEE Communications Magazine (NY: IEEE Press) 1995, the SpeakEasy project was started in 1991 and was the first large-scale software radio. SpeakEasy was motivated in large part by the communications interoperability problems that resulted from different branches of the military services having dissimilar (non-interoperable) radio systems. This lack of communications interoperability can be directly linked to casualties in several conflicts. SpeakEasy had a very aggressive goal of implementing ten different radio waveforms in software on a single platform. The designers chose the fastest DSP available at the time, the Texas Instruments TMS320C40 processor, which ran at 40 MHz. Since this was not enough processing power to implement all of the waveform processing, the system boards were designed to each support four ’C40s as well as some FPGAs.