Patent ID: 8238844

Claim:
An integrated radio transmitter comprising: an audio input interface; a transmit antenna interface; transmit path circuits coupled to the audio input interface and the transmit antenna interface, wherein the transmit path circuits include a transmit tuner having a selectable transmitting frequency; a receive antenna interface; a scan system operative to receive signals within a band from the receive antenna interface and to select a vacant channel within the band; and a master finite state machine (FSM) coupled to the transmit path circuits and the scan system to provide control and communication, wherein the vacant channel selected by the scan system is applied to select the transmitting frequency for the transmit path circuits; and wherein the scan system comprises: a channel condition assessment (CCA) tuner coupled to the receive antenna and operative to tune within the band and operative to generate a tuned analog signal; a CCA analog-to-digital converter (ADC) coupled to the CCA tuner and operative to convert the tuned analog signal to a digital signal; an on-channel selection block responsive to the digital signal and operative to generate an on-channel signal by selecting only on-channel frequencies and substantially disregarding out-of-channel frequencies from the digital signal and operative to generate an on-channel figure of merit (FOM) representing a signal quality measurement of the on-channel signal; and an out-of-channel selection block responsive to the digital signal and operative to generate an out-of-channel signal by selecting only the out-of-channel frequencies and substantially disregarding the on-channel frequencies from the digital signal and operative to generate an out-of-channel FOM representing the signal quality measurement of the out-of-channel signal.