SDR-Widget

I just preordered the BETA version of the upcoming SDR-Widget. This is basically a sound card designed by a group of radio amateurs specifcally to be used in Software Defined Radios based on the quadrature sampling detector scheme, i.e. a souncard is needed in opposite of the Digital Down Conversion scheme where an special ADC chip is doing the analog to digital conversion. I am excited about this and hope this will be a great success!

An early alpha version of the SDR-Widget

Hardware Features:

• Compact 3" x 2.5", 2 board stack. 3.5mm audio connections.
• Powered from the USB port, no external power supply needed
• 24-bit AK5394A ADC - the premier audio ADC in commercial use today
• CS4344 24-bit DAC
• I2C control bus
• 16-bit LCD panel interface (configured for 4-bit) with drivers for HD44780 based 4-line displays
• Connector for quadrature rotary encoder input (with push switch)
• 3 optocoupler buffered inputs
• 3 mosfet 'contact' outputs
• Firmware update via USB port
• JTAG port (connector not mounted)

Software Features (either present or coming soon)

• USB composite device with audio I/O, control and CDC channels
• Supports USB Audio class 2 (480mbs) on the latest Linux kernel as well as the latest Mac OS
• Support 24-bit 48k/96k/192k sample rates on Linux and MacOS
• Support USB Audio class1 on Windows at 48k sample rate. NOTE: Windows does not support UAC2
• Has an integrated CDC, Communications Device Class, channel for debug messages
• A superset of the DG8SAQ control interface
• 4-line LCD message engine
• Menu system with selection control via external rotary encoder and switch.

Go here: http://groups.google.com/group/sdr-widget to get more details!

Active on the HF bands

During last week of August me and my second operator visited my parents and there was a Icom 707 for me to borrow, so why not try some QSOs on the shortwave bands for the first time ever. I operated as SA5BKE/4 and made around 15-20 QSOs around Europe on 80 m up to 17 meters. Great fun! I also promised to send out some QSLs but haven´t made any attempts yet. I am thinking about making some custom ones with this method.

Some week later I saw a Kenwood TS-450SAT for sale at a good price. As it was only 30 minutes drive from here I went there and took a look. Seemed to be a nice rig so I bought it! On 12 September I could try it with my 15,5 m longwire on 4 m height with my home made 9:1 unun. I only made 2 QSOs on 80 m and 17 m, but everything seemed to be fine business. I used a car battery but I now started to look for a power supply. Maybe I find a good one on the upcoming ham radio flea market here in Norrköping in a couple weeks or maybe try to convert a PC power supply?

Summer

Summer of 2010 has been one of the better ones. Very pleasant weather and  I have been home with my son for a couple of months. It has not been that much time for radio. I have done some listening and few times  been working on some test equipment, but that will be covered in a post within a few weeks. I have also had my HF band debut, but I give a report on that within in some day or so.

Here are some other points from the last months:

I have mentioned earlier some interference problem when using the QS1R SDR receiver. One easy solution that I tried and seemed to work was to solder a connector to the 5 V connection in the PC power supply. A lot cleaner than the switching power supply I used earlier. Old PC power supplies can be had for free so maybe I should take use of them more. I also plan to make a 12V->5V regulator to try to run the QS1R from batteries together with the laptop.

A 9:1 un:un for random longwires has been made. See image below. No transmitting with it yet.

Texas Instruments has released a micro controller development board called Launch Pad . It was available for $4, so I ordered one. Maybe they want to compete with Arduino ? The package came and below is a photo of the content. I have not played with it much yet.

I do some shopping on Ebay and mostly from far east. My understanding has been that when I order cheap stuff with low or no shipping cost I take the risk if it gets lost. I ordered some parts from Thai Shop Etc and when I hadn´t received it within a month I started to think I was "scammed". But when I contacted them they said they either will refund me or send the stuff again. I choose the latter and within a week I had it in my hands. Very good service! So I would say that I recommend them.

and last:


The Medium Wave DX season 2010-11 has started when I received some common stations from North American on the 21 August. 1130 WBBR, New York as always the strongest.

Shack update and OS choices

A shack is what someone interested in radio usually calls where they have their radios permanently installed and used. I´ve never had a shack like that as I live in an apartment and all radio use from here has been temporary and the serious DX chasing has been done at the DX listening club.

Now I start to have something that could be called a shack in my wifes parents summer house where I recently installed a 15,5 M longwire antenna. The receivers you see on the picture here is a borrowed Icom R-70 and the QS1R. I struggle with some interferances but I think I will be able to solve them very soon (more about that in later blog post).

I also got a computer on the bench. It´s actually one of my older main PC:s from a couple of years back. It´s an AMD Duron 1300 MHz with 768 MB RAM and 120 GB disk. It runs Windows XP and soon will have Kubuntu on it too. I actually have been a Linux user since the early days of Slackware, and then Debian (used when I and a friend set up the first email system at our school) via OpenSuse  (chosen because we use Novell Suse Enterprise at work for database servers) and now I think I will try Ubuntu (or actually Kubuntu to give it an european touch). I see Ubuntu being mentioned on the ham radio groups and mailing lists so it might be the best choice now.

I gave up with Linux and changed to Mac when I got the opportunity to be a Campus representative for Apple at my university a few years ago. I liked MacOS very much as it gave me both Unix and some fancy software like iLife. Something I learned during this period was that I will not work with sales in future careers!

I moved to Windows again and it was actually because of radio. My first SDR was the SDR-IQ from RfSpace and the software, SpectraVue, could only run on Windows. But I would like to go back to Linux and if recording capabilities in the new QS1R software arrives I might be able to do that.

MKARS80 - via the West Indies

I ordered a MKARS80 transceiver kit a month ago and when it didn´t sbow up here I started wondering. But given that there has been and still is a ash cloud over Europe I understand that it could be delays. Today it came. Take a close look at the package above to see where it went!