I'm equally curious about the possibility of a PC controlled radio scanner, like a sound card A/D, but for radio tuning, scanning and reception. Such a radio could have a platform to support different decoding and modulatin schemes, open source plug-ins, etc. The result could be a software scanner with decoding of virtually any digital scheme and probable decryption for light-weight security schemes in cheaper devices.
Much of my interest in the uniden radios was the possibility of software control and moving along these types of lines. However, these radios do not export enough to let the PC perform signal processing and decoding. Essentially, you want the final conversion fed into something like a high speed modem's programming digital processing chip. Then, in theory, downloadable signal processing can decode virtually any desired modulated signal.
I just like the idea that if you can receive it, you can see it (no illegal intent -- if law enforcement or others want privacy, I assume they use strong encryption and good key management). If someone uses weak obfuscation instead of encryption, caveat emptor.
Dan
