USB SDR (Software Defined Radio) Users?

[drmike]

Anyone in the community dabbling at all with SDRs (Software Defined Radios)?

Bunch of activity around such, including at least one Kickstarter project.

Slews of cheap import USB receivers intended for HDTV reception that with software allow for a fairly broad spectrum of listening.

Anyone doing anything with these devices?   Makes or models you recommend?

 

[peterw]

I was using a FiFi-SDR. But the project is quite dead.


The FiFi SDR was introduced as a construction project for the youth camp ​FichtenFieldDay (FiFi) 2010.
It is an economic and compact software-defined receiver. It is based on the Si570 oscillator and can be connected to a PC via the USB interface.
One speciality of the FiFi SDR is the integrated USB sound card with a 96 kHz sampling rate.
This combination enables the reception of all broadcast and amateur radio bands on medium and short wave in all types of modulation,
including DRM radio, even on notebooks that don't have their own stereo sound input.

One active product is Cross Country Wireless. If I have got some free time I will buy a SDR-4+.

 

[drmike]

Those are nice @peterw.   I was thinking more of the $20+ USB cards which are software hacked to tune more than the HDTV range

 

[Damian]

This stuff looks fun... reminds me of TDA7000 and TEA5712T/LM7000 chips from the mid 90's that I used to play with.

 

[acd]

I have an rtl2832u based device (ezcap dvb-t) and a usrp1, which I got for more bw. The rtl2832u has a theoretical bw of ~2.8 MHz but I've found the useable bw to be more like 1.5-1.8 and I wanted 6+MHz for TV OTA decoding (never got this to work right). They're both fully supported by gnuradio and fun to play with. Expensive though, for the USRP and for compute time. I think I have an old howto rtlsdr + gnuradio -> FM radio on my nearly-dead blog. I can msg you a link if you so desire.