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PCI Shortwave Receiver
payman writes "WiNRADiO Communications has just announced news of its forthcoming WR-G303i PCI based shortwave, digital radio, narrowband FM receiver. This is said to be "the world's first dedicated shortwave receiver on a PC card. It is also the first commercially available receiver where the entire final intermediate frequency stage and an all-mode demodulator are entirely executed in software, running on a personal computer." Winradio has in the past supported Linux for its products (see Linradio), and it most likely will continue to do so with the WR-G303i."
short wave is generally used for long distance communications, its very useful if say you want to listne to a world cup game in italian and live in a non-italian country. Shortwave is used by many people but its not as popular as your standard commerical AM / FM frequencies. If you want to listen to your local KISS 96.whatever station this card isnt for you. If however you want international radio and things like that then shortwave is very cool. I don't know if the reciever my ham friend was using was short wave or not but we always listen to the space shuttle comms. channels with his gear. Someone on here can probably tell me if shortwave is the frequency they use. something tells me its in the 140Mhz area which is not shortwave.
What can this actually do for me? I read the article (read: advertisement) and I'm still lost on what this does.
:) Instead of having circuitry to "detect" the information modulated on the radio signal, you use mathematical algorithms to "detect" that information. It's AM/FM/AFSK/FSK/PSK/Spread Spectrum/SSB and any other mode that can be devised capable. You simply write software to detect the information you want.
With a DSP directly in the IF section, any damn thing you want it to.
I know it's not the answer you were looking for, but I hope someone else was.
--fatboy
ham radio buffs are a thing of the past
Uhhh, not quite.
what stops an unscrupulous person from spamming it and making it unusable to everyone else?
It happens. Also see this.
but what's to stop, say, Sadaam from having a party one day and jaming all short wave channels with a few hundred megawatts of propoganda
It would take a hell of a lot of transmitters and electricity, antennas, etc, and you could easily track the source of the transmission through triangulation.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Yes.
It will do a bit of both. It covers spectrum up to 30Mhz, in that range there is plain old AM radio, HAM radio, commercial marine, military. There's all sorts of transmission modes in there too; plain voice on AM, voice on SSB, morse code on SSB, FM, data of several types.
One of the things you can do for example is receive weather fax's, you can 'snoop' other forms of data communications as well with add-on accessories. Not sure how the radios on a card work with add-ons or if the software can do it outright inline.
What I found odd was the mention that this was a first of some sort, there have been PC based radios similar to this for a long while, and third party linux frontend support as well. Check out freshmeat, there are other radio frontend controller projects too.
Personally I like having a seperate radio device, it's better for the toy factor and at least a little bit safer as far as picking up static discharges on the antennas, which just creeps me out with antennas that go direct to a PCI card.
I think most of the shuttle traffic is done up around the 1.2Ghz now these days. But all over the USA mission control re-broadcast on the amateur frequencies. Some shortwave is use during launch and landing.
Chris Southern
why would i even bother?
for 300$ US i can get an Icom PCR-1000. it does 60Hz-1295Mhz (stupid cell blocked, bah!), has windows, linux and even macos support, only needs a serial interface (works just fine on a USB->serial adapter, even), and i can place it as far as i want from my RF noisy computer shack.
and it uses 13.8vdc. get the picture?
did i mention it was 300$?
They make PCMCIA versions of the rest of their lineup: I doubt one will be long in coming. Of course, the rest of their lineup also starts at $500, so don't expect cheap...
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you