[Amateur-SIG] Softrock 5 Radio

[Todd Collins]

I am working with Parks to secure a kit for me too!  \

Todd 

-----Original Message-----
From: amateur-sig-bounces at dma.org [mailto:amateur-sig-bounces at dma.org] On
Behalf Of Mark Erbaugh
Sent: Monday, January 16, 2006 2:48 PM
To: amateursig at dma.org
Subject: [Amateur-SIG] Softrock 5 Radio


A while back the Ham Radio SIG considered building the Softrock 40 SDR radio
receiver as a project. The Softrock 40 is a Quadrature Sampling Detector
(QSD)  based radio that samples RF down to 11 kHz or so that can be fed to a
computer soundcard and demodulated with DSP software running on the
computer. Unfortunately, before we could decide to make a group purchase,
all the kits were sold out and no further kits were planned.

At the SW Ohio Digital Symposium this past Saturday, there was a
demonstration of the Softrock 5. This is a similar QSD receiver. The
difference is that the QSD has been separated from the frequency source and
band pass filtering. Plug in boards with oscillator and BPF are available
for both 40 and 20. Builders are also encouraged to build their own OSC/BPF.
In fact, with a suitable variable frequency source, the receiver could be
tunable (the 40m BPF actually covers both 40 and 30m).  There are several
freely available software packages that will work with the signals this
produces.

Tony Parks, KB9YIG, has produced kits for the QSD and OSC/BPF. The QSD kit
is $19 and the OSC/BPF kits are $7.50 including shipping. As of this
morning, he had about 100 left but he says that he sold about 30 in the last
few days. I suspect that the demo at the Digital Symposium may create some
more interest.

Tony will take orders via email with payment through PayPal, or check or MO.
His email and PayPal account are raparks at ctcisp.com

For a working receiver, you need to build the QSD kit and at least one
OSC/BPF (40m or 20m) or possibly build your own OSC/BPF. For two band
operation, you could build one QSD and two OSC/BPF kits which could be
swapped out (they plug in) or you could, as I am planning to do, build two
QSD boards.  Most of the assembly uses through hole parts, but there are two
SMT (surface mount) chips that need to be soldered on.

Because of the possibility of getting sold out, I recommend that if you are
interested in building the kit, you contact Tony directly and order what you
want. I don't think we have time to coordinate a group purchase. Then at the
next SIG meeting we can discuss how we want to proceed. If enough people buy
the kits, we can plan a meeting to assemble them. If not, those who do build
the kits can get together outside of the SIG and then show off the finished
projects at a SIG meeting.

Please send me an email with your interest by Wednesday (1/18) night. I'll
check my email first thing Thursday morning and put out an email with the
results.  Please let me know if you have ordered your kit(s) or are only
want to proceed if there is enough other interest in the SIG.

For the record, I have already ordered 2 QSD and 1 each of the 40m and 20m
OSC/BPF kits for myself. I plan on building them whether or not the SIG
does.

73,
Mark

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