At 10:18 AM 6/19/2008, Dana Rawding wrote: >Jim, > >That's exactly why I think there is some positive feedback on the >Indian rig. Add the Atlas/Ozy/Janus combo to it and you are close to >the $1000 board you mentioned. If FRS or someone else offered a 5000 >series style (integrated sound card) 1W board for $1000 I'd buy it. >I've been looking for a 1W rig at a reasonable price for some time. >Mike (KM0T) had a great deal that was gone by the time I had a chance >to investigate. This kind of SDR1K replacement may just be the ticket >or a step in the right direction. > >I'm sure FRS has looked at that market and by appearances (no 1W >radio) decided it was not viable for them. Hopefully as more and more >people move into SDR they we re-evaluate this decision. With guys >like Mike, Philip and others who blazed the trail by using their >SDR-1000 for VHF+ (and kicking everyones rears in the contests) I >think in coming years you will see an increased demand for a SDR based >IF rig just to stay competitive.
There might also be regulatory issues to consider. The F5K, by virtue of it's (closed source) firmware controlled DDS, etc., is an easier sell in terms of not being a scanner, not radiating outside ham bands, etc. It's one thing to sell a bare board which has these capabilities, especially if it's three boards that YOU stack together. It's another to sell it in an enclosure with antenna connectors, etc. So perhaps, a specialized IF rig might be the way to go. You could optimize the filters in the DDS output for the somewhat narrower tuning range. That is, you don't need DC-60 MHz.. a nice 10 MHz span around 30 MHz or 144 MHz could do quite well.. you could also use a different clock strategy... Rather than rely on the DDS to generate the quadrature clocks (and incurring the hassle of matched low pass filters and comparators), you could generate 4x the desired frequency and do a divide by 4 to generate the switching signals for the QSD and QSE. And, have some useful logic for sequencing and band selection of external converters as well (although, perhaps, that's straying into "too many functions in one box" territory..hey, why not put a az/el rotator controller, and a KC tracker emulator and a chiming clock to tell you when it's lunch time and, and, and...) Jim, W6RMK _______________________________________________ FlexRadio Systems Mailing List FlexRadio@flex-radio.biz http://mail.flex-radio.biz/mailman/listinfo/flexradio_flex-radio.biz Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexradio%40flex-radio.biz/ Knowledge Base: http://kb.flex-radio.com/ Homepage: http://www.flex-radio.com/
