Andy obrien wrote: > I have not had an SDR even 24 hours yet, but here are some random > initial thoughts.
Hi Andy, Welcome to the wonderful, strange, and slightly surreal of radio reception that is 'SDR' radio. The basics are all the same, as in 'you canna change the laws of physics, Jim' but the old world of limits because of RF filtering or AF filtering are not exactly gone, but may be swerved around. "3 Yrs ago I contemplated a Flex radio and talked to a neighbour who owned one. He loved his, but warned my that they were very much a "work in progress" and not for someone who wanted a "has to do everything" box. I decided to put my hard earned cash in to a TS2000 instead." I went that route as well, but rapidly learned that the FlexRadio 'One Hardware' idea became 'Many hardware boxes that we sell to you because the original, and new hardware, and next hardware, we decided to improve upon, is the new hardware". I also went the TS2000(X) route as being a good compromise for what I wanted to do. Ah grasshopper, you begin to learn... "After 24 hours, almost... I think I will conclude that seeing a whole bunch of spectrum at once is very useful but something you will lose interest in on average ham days, perhaps only when hunting a specific DXpdition will actually WATCHING the PC screen be something you want to do." What we think we want, and what we really want are often very different things. Forgive me Andy, in your next couple of paragraphs you do cover a lot of ground. But, here goes nothing... "After 24 hours, almost... I think I will conclude that seeing a whole bunch of spectrum at once is very useful but something you will lose interest in on average ham days, perhaps only when hunting a specific DXpdition will actually WATCHING the PC screen be something you want to do." Erm, yes, but no, but yes, but... Andy, like the rest of us, you need to define what you are trying to do. See every signal in a section of the band, or only the weakest? Or, just a particular signal that you want in every other signal that is on the air. Given time, and processing, I guess you will be able to tell the program what callsign and on what frequency you want it to tell you about if it hears it. That's not to say that it will be just that easy. You could wait 10 years before that callsign came up on that frequency, and you heard it, but the software would be that patient and would tell you when it heard it. CW Skimmer is great piece of software, but it really works best on HF, in my experience, and if it doesn't work on the bands you like then it is expensive. Broadcast band DXing with any SDR that covers the HF bands, together with DRM software decoding, can be very good. However, you will also start to learn about optimal Signal to Noise plus Noise ratios when the program you are listening to just suddenly drops out of lock. The radio displays derived from the receiver software will, I agree with you, need to adapt to the wishes of the users but the users do need to see 'something' against which to base their wants. This is a bit of a catch 22 I know, but we users do need to start to play with the signals that we receive and tell the programmers how we would like the SDR Data to be presented to us so that we can feed back to them, and vice versa. However, no matter how good this all gets, I'll still use a simple CW transmitter and receiver and I guess that there will always be someone out there to make contact with. Even the programmer who just coded the latest FEC narrow band signal that can produce an almost error free message transfer wont give me quite the thrill of exchanging contact details on the 23 or 3cm band via aircraft or rain scatter modes by ear with a new country or square. That is the bit that the computer, for me, can never replace. Dave G0DJA
