[AMRadio] "Have you ever tried SDR?"

[Larry Szendrei]

Interesting discussion.

Although I spend by far most of my radio time with vacuum tube 
technology, early this year I got a hair up my butt to learn something 
about SDR and dip my toes into that technology. Being the proverbial 
cheap ham, I bought a Softrock Lite II "single-frequency" SDR kit for 
<$30 delivered to my door and built it for 455KHz. Actually had help 
building it - Bruce W1UJR assisted because he had the proper soldering 
tools for and experience with surface-mount parts. Although I'm 
certainly no stranger to a soldering iron, I am WAY too klutzy to deal 
with that fine-pitched stuff - I've been known to bridge pin connections 
on miniature tubes; in fact I prefer pre-octals ;-)

Years ago I had installed a JFET source-follower off the secondary of 
the 1st IF can in the SX-28 for a scope output, so I feed the Softrock 
with that signal and it's happy. So the front-end is the front-end of 
the SX-28, and the back-end is the 
Softrock-soundcard-computer-software-speakers. The capabilities are 
pretty amazing, but I'm still tuning 20 KHz-wide chunks of spectrum with 
the old SX-28. At the same time, I still enjoy playing minimalist radio 
making AM QSOs with a plate-modulated Hartley oscillator and homebrew 
regen receiver. And everything in between.

So, as someone else has said, one of the great things about this hobby 
is all the facets to explore and enjoy. It's all good, folks! Whatever 
floats yer boat!

73,
-Larry/NE1S