Softrock Lite II receiver for 30 m

Finally. I´ve had this SDR kit in my drawer for over 1 year, but now it´s built and seems to be working fine.

Below a few pictures. As it´s late and my antennas is nothing to talk about here in the apartment, 30 meter is dead. So I´m using the signal generator that I described earlier. I of course want to use Linux but as Rocky seems to be the software suggested to start with I wanted to lower the numbers of 'unknowns' and get it running. And it did! The mirror images was easily suppressed. Below is a picture of WRPlus that I tried after Rocky:

Here are two pictures of the temporary test setup...

The SDR-Widget is now housed in a  box, temporarily. I have not flashed the firmware yet to allow 192 kHz usage. Will do that later, when I will try to get it running in Linux.

And to end with, some close up pictures on the board. The coax connection isn´t the prettiest, but it seems to work while testing. I will have do redo that when I put in a permanent box.

My SMD soldering skills has been improved and now I feel confident to go ahead with other bigger project.  

QS1R, WinradHD and Solar Storm

I´ve had the QS1R receiver for about 1,5 years now. It´s a great receiver, one of the most advanced software defined radios that you can get among those aimed for private use. The major reason why I bought it instead of the Perseus is the openness. All code is GPL! The software architecture is really first class, where DSP are done in a server process and the GUI is in another one.

The major drawback with the current state of QS1R software is unfortunately that it lacks spectrum recording, maybe the most important feature for a DX listener. The idea of recording a wide bit of the AM band on top of the hour and then be able to go over every interesting frequency at a later time is something we have got used to. Luckily I can use the QS1R with another software, Winrad orginally developed by Alberto I2PHD, that supports recording. A new version of an alternative version of Winrad called WinradHD was recently released and also a new DLL plugin for QS1R was released also. Now I can record up to 2 MHz wide but I only need  around 1200 kHz (1710 - 530). A lot of HD is needed.

I tried to listen for DX on the morning of 5th of April  with only a mini whip antenna (designed by PA0RDT), see top image. K-index was from 3-7 so no transatlatic DX was noted I thought at first and we are also late in the season, but after a closer look on the files I see that there are some sunrise improvements and around 0400 UTC there are some Latin American stations on the higher portion of the band (1400 - 1600). I´ve not had time to go through them so I can put definite IDs but my guess is that it´s stations from Venezuela, Colombia and Peru. I hope to try this receiving setup more during the Spring.