[Amateur-SIG] Softrock 5 Radio

[Mark Erbaugh]

As promised, here is an update on the Ham SIG Softrock 5 Radio project.

To date, four members, including myself, have ordered kits.

Most people that ordered a kit have expressed an interest in assembling them
as a group. Even if you don't have your own kit to build there are two
boards for each radio (QSD and OSC/BPF) and some people ordered two radios,
so there should be something for everyone to work on.

If you have experience working with surface mount parts, you would be
welcome as there are two SMT chips that need to be installed.

The question is when do we want to do it. Our February meeting is the Wings
party at Hooters and is already scheduled with Hooters.  I think George has
something scheduled for March and April. If you're like me, you don't want
to wait too long to get started or the kit will never get built.  Is there
another evening in February where the OTAP site is available? Or is there
another location? Does someone want to host an assembly party?  I'd be
willing to host it if there aren't too many, but I live in about 50 miles
away in London, OH.

If you're still interested in building a Softrock 5, there still may be time
to order a kit for yourself.  Here's the info I previously posted to the
SIG.

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 Monday
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.