Sunday 13 June 2010

First Steps in SDR

I mentioned in an earlier entry how a local amateur friend had purchased an Elektor, general coverage SDR receiver board. After some initial problems , he is up and running with it and it sounds like quite a promising piece of kit.
In the meantime he has loaned me a Softrock receiver board which he built some time ago.
The Softrock is a crystal controlled receiver. This one covers both 40 and eight metres.  But only a portion of those bands. With my sound card I get a 96khz section of both bands (largely the CW section).You may not be able to tell from the pic but it is very small in size with lots of tiny components on the board. I wouldn't fancy my chances at building one!

Initial impressions of using the Softrock is that I have a lot to learn! In addition to your receiver and antenna your results are also affected by the quality and type of the sound card you use. The SDR software seems quite confusing to someone like me who is used to turning knobs and pressing buttons. In any event I have the receiver up and running. I have decided to use the Winrad software with this board, after having compared a few programs including the "Power SDR" program pictured.

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