- CW DECODER TRANSCEIVER SOFTWARE WITH WATERFALL HOW TO
- CW DECODER TRANSCEIVER SOFTWARE WITH WATERFALL SERIES
I’m not going to tell you that I put it together in an hour or two. If you want to take it by step by step, you can build and test each stage as you go along, or you can just stuff all the parts into the board and cross your fingers that it will work (which if you have previous experience with SMT and electrostatically sensitive devices, it probably will.) What fun! I’m not going to go into detail on the assembly, except to say that there are detailed online instructions. What service!Ī day or two later, the kit arrived in the mail:Ī little bag of parts for only $10, and on top of that, I get to solder SMT devices for the first time ever.
An hour after I paid using Paypal, I received an e-mail telling me that my order had already shipped. Any excuses I had to not build my first SDR receiver evaporated! I ordered a SoftRock Lite II Receiver kit for 40m from Tony’s website. Shipping is $1, bringing the total cost of the kits to $11. These are single band SDR receiver kits for just $10 each. They vary in capabilities and prices, but the kits that caught my attention were the SoftRock Lite II kits.
CW DECODER TRANSCEIVER SOFTWARE WITH WATERFALL SERIES
I’d heard of the SoftRock, but was only vaguely aware of what it was, so I looked it up, discovered that it was a series of SDR kits designed and sold by Tony Parks KB9YIG. Then a week or so later I had a CW QSO with local amateur KE6YX, during the course of which he mentioned to me that had built a SoftRock receiver, and was waiting for an SDR transceiver kit to arrive in the mail. I’ve been aware of Software Defined Radio for a while now but had no direct experience with it until a few weeks ago when I requested a demo version of PowerSDR and some sample IQ files from FlexRadio. The band sounded clean and pure of course, much of this probably had to do with the fact that there was very little in the way of filtering, but nevertheless my mind had been opened to the fact that a radio didn’t have to be a superhet to turn in good performance.įast forward almost 30 years and SDR is on my mind. I had heard reports of direct conversion receivers being afflicted with breakthrough from strong broadcast stations, but not with this radio that used 4 matched diodes in the diode ring mixer. His company, WPO communications were selling a kit for this radio, so I bought it and was highly impressed with the performance of the receiver. The heart of the receiver was the Mini Circuits SBL1-8 double balanced mixer package consisisting of a schottky diode ring. It also appeared in the pages of Ham Radio Today and was designed by G3WPO. That particular issue became very dog-eared and while I never did build that particular receiver, a few years later, I did build a DSB transceiver for 80M that utilised a direct conversion receiver.
CW DECODER TRANSCEIVER SOFTWARE WITH WATERFALL HOW TO
The issue that contained the schematics and other information on how to build a direct conversion receiver for 80 and 160m captured my attention. Apologies if the headline for this post is a little sensational – it’s the broadcaster in me trying to get your attention (DJ’ing/Voiceover/Production was my career for over 20 years until recently.)Īs a teenager growing up in England who was really into radio and electronics, I was a regular reader of Practical Wireless.