#Wideband receiver radio software#

Today there are only a few of these left in the wild and are traded for unrealistic prices on $bay. The company died the usual death by capitalism (bought by another company and then stripped down and moved production to China). One of them was the Dressler ARA-2000, covering 50-2000MHz, designed and built in the 90's. Not everyone has the space or possibility to put up a Discone-Antenna, so why not use an antenna, that performs even better than a Discone (at least it did here in direct comparison), is a lot smaller and looks way less “conspicuous”: Other people often recommend Discone-Antennas for wideband reception, but there also are other, less known alternatives, which still are a very good compromise as a general purpose wideband receiver antenna. Unfortunately, there just is no can-do-it-all-perfectly antenna, even if some despicable corporations try to market their products as such. On #rtlsdr people often ask about antennas, because they are clearly not satisfied (and who could blame them) with the performance of the original L/4 DVB-T stub.

However, the antenna itself, is still hardware and will most likely never be replaceable by software.

#Wideband receiver radio software#

The real beauty about it is this: Unlike hardware receivers, which can't simply be replicated and shared, we only have to come up with good software receivers/transceivers once and then may just share them amongst each other, without any limitation. The last Mission-Log about a GNU-Radio based NFM SDR receiver pulled in a lot of people, looking for examples, to better understand GRC and to improve their own SDR projects. Thanks to the work of the GNU-Radio and OsmoCom developer crowd, this barrier is finally gone and everyone can, more or less, directly access, what the antenna receives. Software Defined Radio (SDR) has finally reached a much broader mass of people, who wanted to play with RF technology, but didn't find the time or resources to learn all necessary skills, to build a hardware based radio.