Yes, this is the wildly speculative advanced optics thread, and I think that I could be just as off the wall as anyone else on these matters. It would be helpful, however, to have a better grasp of how SR would actually model such a low end application, in this type of hand off situation. Til this point I've envisioned the sr box as being one of high end aggregation at end points, not on- and off- ramps at intermediate stop off locations.
Discreet frequency pick off, right. Through some means which would employ resonant circuits combined with digital keys for basic scrambling purposes (for signal shaping and as a first phase of security), and higher orders of encryption deeper into the applications, for more thorough security assurance. My point was that there are too many other aspects to clear first, before worrying about how to secure the message. You first have to have some viable way of getting the message across.
Sometimes I'm sure you wonder why I pooh pooh cable modems as I sometimes tend to do, with a touch of irreverance. I don't, not really. It's just that I've been to that movie before. Consider the following:
During the late Seventies and very early Eighties, some of my larger clients in lower Manhattan were being fed 56 kb/s, T1 and T3 circuits over Manhattan Cable TV [now TWX] coaxial facilities. Scientific Atlanta modems were used, and each end-point had its own frequency/spectrum allocation. A channel, would you believe.
These data links were not shared, in the same sense that cablemodem links are shared today, for they each had their own dedicated spectrum. In actuality, they were not "end points," per se, in a straight path ternination sense, rather, they were taps on a circular topology comprising special segments of cable TV plant, using BNC coax connections immediately on the cable itself along the way, which fed coaxial cables to the terminal devices.
Bringing up links was achieved by "tuning in" to the desired center frequency of these AM channels. I'm not suggesting that something so crude would be appropriate here, but this serves as a good analogue for where I think the SR model would takes us.
Would an optical beam splitter (devoid of RF gadgetry) be used to extract optical signals first? Or, must the transducer be fully capable of managing both optical and RF aspects of discrimination?
Once we begin talking about how to tune in the channel, however, we get away from the more pertinent issue of how to deploy SRSC in its various future roles on the medium. I don't know where we're going with this, frankly. Get us back on course. |
