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."

Comments

Anyone here a ham radio buff?

[ShooterNeo]

Granted, ham radio buffs are a thing of the past (I bet those same geeks were the first people on the internet and the early online services like compuserve in the late 80s) but I always had one basic question.

Since shortwave is more or less a party line with pure analog transmission, what stops an unscrupulous person from spamming it and making it unusable to everyone else? Sure, if you did that in the US FCC troops would come bust down your door 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.

one ham's opinion

[frovingslosh]

I'm a ham, such items normally interest me.

I visited the site (at least it's not slashdoted), but I have no interest in this hack. Here are my complaints:

I wasted time looking at their site, but s far as I could tell they don't want to tell me the price on the thing. If the price is listed anywhere it is certainly not easy to find, even a targeted price range. Do they think I'm so hard up to have this that I'll tell them I want it even if they will not tell the price?

While they don't seem to want to tell the price, they did mention that there will be a standard software demodulator and an optional "Professional demodulator". And more demodulators later. They don't say what the professional demodulator will cost, but as it is optional it certainly will cost. So why would I want to buy their stuff and have crippled non-professional software? And on top of that they know the professional modulator can be replaced with something else in the future that will obviously cost me more money!

OK, I know it costs money to develop software, but in this case when the software is tightly tied to their hardware, I want a company that sells me the hardware and then supports me, not one that tries to bleed me dry, even delivering less than professional software with the basic package and then asking if I want the good software! Of course I want the good software. What I want even more is good open source software, or even hardware interface specs so that I can roll my own. But that is hardly likely to be forthcoming from a company that looks at their hardware customers as cash cows for their software.

There are other issues as well, the inside of a PC is hardly the best environment for a RF receiver. But I might be willing to experiment with this hardware if it was sold with decent software without a bait and switch approach, and the company was more open about things like the prices and the hardware interface.

Re:one ham's opinion

[Anonymous Coward]

This seems to be a common problem with HAM radio in general. It has actually been like that ever since I can remember (back maybe 20+ years).

I call it engineer syndrome. For some reason engineers feel compelled to patent and hide everything they do. It's a superiority complex, but not some some programmers have, it's every single damn one of them bastards. There are tons of HAM's (ie. engineers) that have stifled the hobby by wasting time hiding all their secrets to then only have the project/products die soon after.

Re:Okay, now...

[Anonymous Coward]

this page says "9 kHz to 30 MHz"

AFAIK, none of the commercial FM stations in the US are in that range.