Skip to main content

Joining the SDR* club

Posted Labels:
The 80m SoftRock Lite that I got 2 months ago received its first signals late this afternoon -- to my surprise. I didn't expect it to work without some troubleshooting!

Most of the build was done before Christmas, but I had to steal time to get the toroids wound and installed. One of them sat for 2 weeks on the workbench just waiting for me to turn on the soldering iron. This afternoon I finally did, then decided to keep going by attaching barebones connectors for power, antenna, and line-in.

Downloaded Rocky, attached a telescoping whip, clicked "Start Radio," and scratched my head till I selected the correct line-in settings to get some band noise out of the computer's speakers. Soon after, I was copying W1MK, then some other 1s, some 2s, someone in AZ, and a DX pileup. Very cool.

This $10 radio went together pretty easily without any special equipment beyond that needed for any other radio kit I've put together. It's an incredible bargain, but dangerous... now I'm eyeing the RXTXv6.1 and a Delta 44.

*SDR = software-defined radio

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Elusive Subja Seed

Posted
Why am I so captivated by the idea of drinking tasteless, slippery, crunchy-kerneled seeds? Because subja seeds sound like fun. I first learned of them by browsing The Indian Spice Kitchen , where Monisha Bharadwaj describes them, but Osimum basilicum seeds seem impossible to find. I made a special trip to Seattle's Uwajimaya to track them down, but came up empty. I stopped at Market Spice at Pike Street, where they hadn't heard of them (but they suggested another shop down the street). I went into Souk, where the gentleman understood what I was looking for only after I described it; he knew the seeds by a different name, which he couldn't remember, and said his sister gets them at a shop (the name not in his memory) on Roosevelt Avenue. But I was out of time in the city and couldn't follow up. (But before I took more than a few steps out Souk's door, the proprietor called me back in, because he had asked his arriving friend what those seeds were called. Tukmaria, ...
7 comments
Read more

Realistic HTX-100

Posted
The 30th Annual Conference of the Central States VHF Society was held July 26-28, 1996 at the Thunderbird Hotel & Convention Center in Bloomington, Minnesota. Among the papers presented was Make Your HTX-100 a Flexible IF Transceiver by Rus Healy, NJ2L (now K2UA).
3 comments
Read more

Oh, no! Web 2.0

Posted
Always wanting to be at least semi-aware of what's coming down the pike in technology, I was drawn to TechSoup 's " event " this week (a hosted forum discussion with special guests) promising to "demystify Web 2.0 technologies and illustrate how using new socially oriented technological innovations can help the nonprofit community." First off, I'm so semi-unaware lately that I thought they were going to be addressing Internet 2. Just as well I was wrong. To wiki or not to wiki? To start syndication really simply? To tag, make social bookmarks, et cetera... these are the questions. Nothing "new," really. Just the current wave of actualized concepts being ridden by the tech-savvy (and some not-so-savvy) into the inevitable evolution of the web. So I got thinking about my own foundering blog, static websites, aborted forays into 2.0 technologies. It's easy to get excited about the potential of these new technologies, but it's another to co...
Post a Comment
Read more