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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."
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.
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$?