As to the question of laptops, the cited machine is probably OK. I have an aging Celeron laptop at 1.5 GHz which works marginally well for SDR use with the Extigy soundcard.
I did not buy it for SDR useage either, but it manages to do the job when I ask it to. Just. There are occassional glitches -- it is just about all my lappy can handle. So, I'd say that the cited machine will probably turn out to be OK. There's probably enough "GHz" in it. More than enough, in fact. The main issue is likely to be whether there's enough L1/L2 cache to run totally glitch free. It will run better than mine. If you're springing for an SDR to start with, I'd give serious thought to a desktop machine with the Delta 44 card in it. There's a lot of excitement about the external sound cards that give wider bandwidth just now. But for HF usage, that's not so important IMHO, and, in any case, the easiest way to make the laptop work better is to use the more normal bandwidth as the older cards do. Even if the sound card is capable of more. Since the SDR is a great base station rig, a 300 dollar, used, Pentium IV 2.4 GHz XP machine as an "accompanyment" isn't a bad choice. That combination is glitch-free for me and has garnered me about 190 DXCC countries. The Delta 44 is about 200 dollars more, with cables. Larry WO0Z _______________________________________________ FlexRadio mailing list FlexRadio@flex-radio.biz http://mail.flex-radio.biz/mailman/listinfo/flexradio_flex-radio.biz Archive Link: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexradio%40flex-radio.biz/ FlexRadio Homepage: http://www.flex-radio.com/ FlexRadio Knowledge Base: http://kb.flex-radio.com/
