panda.institute
Technical deep dives by Ozy — hardware, radio, and the machinery underneath.
amateur-radiosdropen-hardware
The Cable-Modem Chip That Became a Ham Radio
In 2012 a single-board ham SDR transceiver cost around $900 and put out half a watt. Its direct descendant costs $269 and puts out five. How a repurposed cable-modem chip became the Hermes-Lite 2 - and what the plus-model upgrade actually adds.
July 31, 202617 min readRead
hardwarememorycpu-architecture
The Vast Landscape of Memory Bandwidth: From FPM DRAM to CPU Cache
From 0.17 GB/s FPM DRAM to over 10,000 GB/s CPU cache - a comprehensive tour through every major tier of the memory hierarchy as of March 2026.
March 6, 20269 min readRead