SDR Anyone?

Following on the Bosses post here, there is a very Geeky article in Linux Journal to get your hands dirty if you wish. Yes software defined radio on your kitchen table, from the guy who started the whole thing.

Our setup consists of a conventional FM dipole antenna, a cable modem tuner module mounted on an evaluation board and a 20M sample/second PCI analog-to-digital converter (ADC) card. The antenna plugs in to the input of the tuner module. The tuner module IF output is connected with a piece of coaxial cable to the ADC input on the back of the computer. The tuner module eval board is connected to the PC’s parallel port so that we have a way of controlling the module.

The specific hardware we’re using is a Microtune 4937 DI5 3X7702 cable modem tuner module and a Measurement Computing PCI-DAS 4020/12 ADC board. This particular tuner module is hard to get, but others, such as those from Sharp Microelectronics, ought to work fine (see the on-line Resources section).

Roll up your sleeves and give it a go. This kind of stuff if not just reserved for multi billion dollar corporations.

Linky.