Software Defined Radio Limitations. For Radio Equipment Manufacturers and System Integrators SDR Enables. Mixers filters amplifiers modulatorsdemodulators detectors etc are instead implemented by means of software on a personal computer or embedded system.
What once was limited primarily to the military radio market is now absolutely everywhere from mobile phones to Wi-Fi routers to ham radio development boards to extremely inexpensive. In a traditional receiver all the actual work of making sense of a signal is done by physical componentsThese cost money. Thus it is ein eierlegende Wollmilchsau.
An SDR performs significant amounts of signal processing in a general purpose computer or a reconfigurable piece of digital electronics.
For high bandwidth sampling the data flow is enormous - enough to stress the limits of modest desktop computers. These cases often demand receivers to identify and discriminate between. Its creator Joseph Mitola defined the term in the early90s as an identifier of a class of radios that could be reprogrammed and reconfigured through software12. Power consumption is more due to rapid switching of modes 2.