[Skimmertalk] Brief experiment with Skimmer and 40 Meter SoftRock at Field Day

[Pete Smith]

The bandpass filters on the front end of the SoftRock are extremely broad, 
so I'm not surprised.  On the other hand, if you had a set of W3LPL RX 
bandpass filters in front of it, results might have been different.  I've 
noticed that with my all-band Softrock I tend to demodulate SW broadcast 
signals around the local oscillator frequency, which tells you something 
about how broad it is.

One possible option - I think N3HVQ is working with it - is the SDR-IQ 
(www.rfspace.com).  I would still expect to need bandpass filtering in 
front of it, in a multi-transmitter environment, but at least it has a 10db 
attenuator and variable RF gain.  It also receives from 500Hz (that's 
right, Hz) to 30 MHz, so it could be useful for a lot of other things, 
including spectrum analysis, LOWFERing, and SWLing.  Best of all, it's 
USB-powered and doesn't need a sound card!

73, Pete

At 10:03 AM 6/30/2008, KD4D wrote:
>Good day, everyone:
>
>I hooked a skimmer up to a 40 meter dipole at our Field Day just to play 
>with it.  The
>$12 SoftRock kit was, not surprisingly, completely overwhelmed by the RF 
>environment
>and mostly decoded every possible variant of W3AO at almost every 
>frequency in the
>band.  And, we were only running 100 watts.
>
>If this is going to be useful in a large multi-op scenario, a better 
>receiver is going
>to be required.  Has anyone had experience with some of the other SDR's in a
>multi-op environment, especially one running high power.
>
>I expect even the SoftRock to work much better monitoring a band where there
>isn't a local tranmitter active!
>
>73,
>
>Mark, KD4D
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