SDR demo at Hamcon

[zarg7883]

Yesterday I attended Hamcon 2011 in Torrance CA. One of the companies doing live demos was Flexradio. They really impressed me by showing how they could use two receivers, feeding one in different phase with the other. The noise floor just dropped out of the way, opening up the weak signals.

They also said they could be added in phase to bring up weaker signals, however it seems to me that would just amplify the noise level too. But since this is all software defined, you can do DSP and special filters all you want. Presumably a lot more to come.

At another booth they had a recorded audio of a busy CW band, opened wide. You could easily pick out at least 5 different operators going. They turned CW Skimmer loose on it. There were dozens of them in there, you could see the tracks. CW Skimmer was identifying them all, not just the callsign but what they were doing: calling CQ, working some other specific station, etc.

On a SDR radio, click and your radio is instantly tuned right to that spot so you can pounce and get it yourself. I can understand why some feel that would give contest ops an unfair advantage.

Lots of other stuff at the show. This wasn't too bad this year, in all.

Sent from my iPhone using the SatelliteGuys App

 

[w6pea]

Interesting. Thanks for your post.

 

[ikki]

SDR's are nice. I have a Winradio G303 and it so one of the pleasant receivers I have ever used. I did previously own an SDR-1000 that I ended up selling after a couple of years that I had used on the ham bands for the digital modes.

It may be the future, and every shack should have one for at least receiving, but there is something to be said about a traditional self contained radio that is can turn on in an instant with out having to wait for a bootup.

That is why I still have a Kenwood 2000, the Icom Pro 2 may have better toys but it takes at least 30 seconds to boot up, and an SDR requires 1 to 2 minutes to boot up.