Amateur Radio

I have taken an interest in Amateur Radio. The plan is to join the local Amateur Radio society (in Banbury Oxon), get a licence, build equipment. Especially my interest will be:

Software Defined Radios.

These are radios which are driven by computer programs running on a PC. I am a MacBook man, but there are a few SDR programs for the Mac so I will try these first. There are also apps for the iPad which I will try out.

Initially I plan to build a receiver, the G0NQE kit (from Kanga Products). This looks fairly simple:



Next I will tackle a more complicated Transmitter/Receiver, the Softrock Ensemble TXRX (horrible name), this looks like this:



As you can see there is a lot more to it. Anyway its capabilities are much more.

These SDRs are fascinating

They are so un-like conventional radios, The incoming signals are heterodyned with local oscillator and the result fed to a computer sound input. Then the computer software detects the audio frequencies and allows you to tune along a narrow band.