By then, the “very technical” articles were shuffled off to specialized venues, so the average ham didn’t see them, unlike earlier times when articles about parametric amplifiers and under the noise reception were next to one tube transmitters and how to solder coax connectors. I think it’s the 2001 ARRL Handbook that shows an SDR that uses a soundcard. I remember an early arricle that explained in general terms, no schematic because at that time it wasn’t feasible for the hobbyist (because of the lack of fast A/D converters, and I think computing power).

SDRs are treated as black boxes because they are treated as such. If you tell people “this is hard”, it self-perpetuates. Posted in Radio Hacks, Raspberry Pi Tagged ham radio, HF, raspberry pi, sdr Post navigation

He also created the Antuino, an Arduino based antenna tester. is well known in the ham radio community for low cost radio designs like the BITX, and it’s successor, the μBITX. also created a GUI for the 7″ Raspberry Pi screen.Īt the moment the sBITX is still in the development stage, information is spread between the video after the break, it’s accompanying PDF, the GitHub repo, and a thread on the BITX20 group. For transmit, the signal is generated in software, and then upconverted to the desired RF frequency. The signal is then demodulated in software using FFT. On the receive side, a simple superheterodyne architecture is used to feed a 25 kHz wide slice of RF spectrum to an audio codec, which send the digitized audio to the Raspberry Pi. The hardware is designed to be as simple as possible. To do this, he chose the Raspberry Pi as base, and wrote C code that that anyone who has done a bit of Arduino programming should be able to understand and modify.

One of the primary goals of the project was to lower the barrier of entry. He first goes over the available open source SDR radios, and then delves into his design decisions for the sBITX. Watch the full talk in the video after the break. introduced the project in talk at the virtual “Four Days In May” annual conference of the QRP Amateur Radio Club International. hopes to change this with the sBITX, a hackable HF SDR transceiver designed around the Raspberry Pi. However, building your own SDR is not something too many hackers are confident to tackle.

Cheap, easy to use SDR dongles are an immensely powerful tool for learning about radio technology.

Ham radio deluxe raspberry pi