[Premium-Rx] Need Recommendation for Receiver Control Software

[Tim Shoppa]

"Michael O'Beirne" <michaelob666 at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> Fiddling about with software seems to be an awfully tedious way of achieving 
> your aim.

I'm not generally in favor of putting a computer where it doesn't have
to be but:

Once you start getting above a couple of receivers, the physical wiring/
switching gets cumbersome. Some sort of digital switching fabric starts
looking increasingly attractive. The phone companies decided to start
moving in this direction almost half a century ago. (Of course they had
tens of milions of voice lines to switch).

And there's the overall gotcha that with as many as 10 receivers that
the OP was asking about, we've still only got two ears :-).  The computer
can record stuff that we come back and listen to later.

The spooks were doing these things with radios decades ago.

I'm completely flabbergasted that today, any ordinary joe with a PC
and a tiny amount of money can record
not just audio, but an entire swath of the RF spectrum onto a computer
for later playback and analysis. This was big-ticket stuff for governments
just a few years back.

I have seen a Windows software product called "CW skimmer" decode dozens of
simultaneous CW transmissions in the same band. Theres similar products
for RTTY, PSK, and other digital modes. I know that the US govt
was spending megabucks for similar capabilities just a couple of years
ago, but today it's something you pay $75 for.

I still have a belief that computers and software are sucky and
often have sucky interfaces and sucky capabilities, but that was
even more true for the stuff the US govt was buying for millions of
dollars a few years go than for the stuff that is free or less than
$100 on a PC-clone today :-)

Tim.