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

Very Cool

[m0rph3us0]

This looks pretty cool, and does 6Mhz AM, little known fact that you can listen to lightning storms on 6Mhz AM world wide. If forget the homepage of the group but there is a group using 6 Mhz AM and RDF equiptment to plot lightning strikes across the world. If anyone has a link to the group it would be much appreciated, can't even find it on google. --morph

GNU Radio?

[Russ Nelson]

If these guys have Linux support, then what is Eric Blossom doing with GNU Radio? And why have these two articles about SDR been posted today?
-russ

Check Out These Cool Frequencies!

[Anonymous Coward]

* 1100 UTC Radio New Zealand, 17675 kHz; check also 6105 or 6145 as possibilities
* 1300 UTC Radio Australia 5995, 6020, 9580, 11650
* 1400 UTC Radio Australia as above
* 1500 UTC Radio Japan 9505 kHz
* 1600 UTC Voice of Russia 9470, 11675, 11775, 15490
* 1700 UTC Voice of Russia as above and 9560 kHz.
* 1800 UTC Voice of Russia as above and 7305, 7340, 9765, 9775, 9890 kHz.
* 1900 UTC Voice of Russia as above and 12070 kHz.
* 2000 UTC UAE Radio Dubai 13675 (Arabic)
* 2100 UTC Voice of Iran 15084 kHz (Farsi)
* Radio Kuwait 9855 (Arabic)
* 2200 UTC Radio Sofia, Bulgaria 7535, 7545 kHz
* Radio Cairo, Egypt 9900 kHz.
* Voice of Turkey 9445, 9460 (Turkish)
* Voice of Greece 9395, 11595 (Greek)
* 2300 UTC Radio Austria Int. 5945, 6155, 9870 (German & English)
* Radio Prague, Czech Rep 7345, 9435
* RAI Italy 6010, 9675, 11800 (Italian)
* R. France Intern'l 9715, 9790 (French)
* Voice of Germany 6100, 9545, 9730 (German)
* Radio Exterior, Spain 9540, 9630 (Spanish)
* Vatican Radio 5880 (Italian)
* 0000 UTC BBC World Service 5975, 6175, 9590
* 0100 UTC Brazilian stations between 4750 & 5100 kHz
* 0200 UTC Brazilian stations between 4750 & 5100 kHz
* 0300 UTC CKZU St. John's, Newfoundland on 6160 kHz
* 0400 UTC CHNX Halifax, NS on 6130 kHz
* Radio Villa, Dominican Rep 4960 (Spanish)
* Ecos del Torbes, Venezuela 4980 (Spanish)
* 0500 UTC R. Havana Cuba 9820, 9830 kHz.
* Voice of the Andes, Ecuador 9745, 12015
* WWCR Nashville, TN 5070 kHz
* WBCQ Monticello, ME 7415 kHz
* Voice of America 7170, 7295, 9700
* 0600 UTC Radio For Peace, Costa Rica 6975, 15050
* R. Mexico Int'l 9705 (Spanish)

You can also check out military, air traffic, even natural phenomenon like solar flares, lightning storms, and things.

Here's another list.

Re:Anyone here a ham radio buff?

[fatboy]

Since shortwave is more or less a party line with pure analog transmission,

There is plenty of digital traffic on HF.

what stops an unscrupulous person from spamming it and making it unusable to everyone else?

The ITU. Even though I do remeber Castro took 1510 WLAC here in Nashville, along with other stations on the East Coast, off the air around 1989 because of "TV Marti". (Sorry for no links. I'm lazy.)

Atencion: Seis Siete Tres Siete Cero

[plimsoll]

This could be a great opportunity to further explore the fascinating world of so-called numbers stations; espionnage TX's from shadowy intelligence organizations (as if there were any other kind) all around the globe- encrypted with one-time pads and allowing agents to receive orders with nothing more than a modified walkman.

An excerpt from NPR's Lost & Found Sound:
"Eventually, if listeners dig around [the shortwave spectrum] long enough, they'll tune across voices reciting endless strings of numbers. These broadcasts have been heard for at least 40 years. The signals are powerful, but they contain no information about location of the transmitter or the intended audience. Most listeners linger for a short time, then tune away, utterly baffled."

When I discovered these myself, I found them bizarre, chilling- and intriguing. In order to get some background, I ordered a 4-CD set from Irdial recordings in the UK called The Conet Project... highly reccomended.

What is perhaps the most surprising is that the number of numbers stations boradcasting on the shortwave band are only increasing- variously attributed to the increasing sophistication of organized crime, drug cartels, terrorist/separatist organizations and an increasingly fractious global intelligence community.

Do follow the links above if this intrigues you in the slightest- and just try going back to your insular world-view afterwards; "the enemy" is out there, and he's hiding right out in the open.

/. Article

[plimsoll]

Sorry to reply to my own comment on this, but I (now) see this has been covered a bit already...

Crack a "Numbers" Station
Posted by Hemos on Sat 27 May 01:35PM
from the cool-insight dept.
boss soul writes: "On Friday, NPR did an excellent story on those infamous 'Numbers Stations' that broadcast on shortwave radio. Since the 1950s, these stations have been broadcasting nothing but an unidentified human voice reading a string of numbers. Though most people believe that these broadcasts are used by intelligence agencies to communicate with their agents abroad, there has never been any way to confirm this ... until now! The makers of "The Conet Project" (a four-CD set of numbers-station recordings) have thrown down the proverbial gauntlet and announced a series of "cryptographic challenges" -- the object of which is to crack an actual numbers station broadcast. Dust off your Crypto caps, everyone -- I want to see a slashdotter win this one! "

Re:Anyone here a ham radio buff?

[the eric conspiracy]

ham radio buffs are a thing of the past

Ham radio hobbyists provide an important redundant channel that is extremely difficult to knock off the air. When the hurricanes and earthquakes are done, all a Ham needs is a car battery and a length of wire to make contacts all over the world. Here is an article on use of Ham radio during some problems on Mir:

http://www.hamradio-online.com/1997/jun/mircrisi s. html

And here is one on activities associated with Isadore that are in progress as I type this:

http://www.arrl.org/

There are currently about 680,000 licensed ham operators in the US.

This a large number to relegate to the past..

I bet those same geeks were the first pepple on the internet and the early online services like compuserve in the late 80s)

Hams were much more likely to run their own BBS than hang out on a service like Compuserve.

what stops an unscrupulous person from spamming it and making it unusable to everyone else

Te short answer is: The Laws of Physics.

It is possible to jam a few frequencies here and there, but to jam shortwave transmissions world-wide takes something with the power of a solar flare. That's a lot more than a few hundred megawatts.

During the cold war the Soviet Union + Warsaw Pact tried (and mostly failed) to jam transmissions like the Voice of America, Deutsche Welle, KOL Israel, Radio Tirana and the BBC to their own populations. Estimates were that they were spending about $1 billion per year, had 200 large scale jamming stations and were putting out about 1 terawatt of EMR.