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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."
I know my TV Tuner card has a ton of it.
And what's on shortwave that isn't streamed like the BBC?
If they plan Linux support, why exactly is it called the "WiNRADiO" (complete with the cool-in-1992 lower case i's)?
jello.
aka aron.
When you said PC-card, I thought it might be PCMCIA.
:-)
Now THAT would be a fun card to stick into my HP 200LX.
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
God, I hope so! An HP or Tek costs the same as a small house.
What can this actually do for me? I read the article (read: advertisement) and I'm still lost on what this does. It's a shortwave radio. Great. Can I get local radio stations with it?
I'm not being sarcastic or anything, I'm just curious of to whom this is relevant and why.
Danish != nationality
...doesn't it bother people when the 'lin' in Linux syllable replaces the 'win' syllable in Windows? Linmodems, LindowsOS...it makes it sound like cheap imitation cereal with crappy names like "Honey Buzzles" instead of "Honey Combs" and "Nutty Nuggets," etc.
Anyone else get annoyed by this?
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
What DRM is included in the hardware and/or software?
Call (206) 338-5780 COLLECT for information about a genuine BA, BS, MA, MS, MBA, or Ph.D.
Like I don't hear enough Clearchannel radio in the CAR!
{Note the subtle humor before modding}
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
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
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
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.
* 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.
What exactly does this device do? It lets me listen to radio stations on my computer? Or is this picking up the ham radio frequencies?
Could someone give me an overview of what exactly this is useful for?
I'm not trying to troll, I'm just a little confused about what this thing does and what it is useful for.
I noticed that WiNRADiO also sells some other cards that can monitor frequencies other than shortwave radio...one card, the WR-3700i-DSP can monitor the range from 150kHz up to 4gHz...if everyone had one of these, would it be possible for a group like SETI@Home to make a huge, distributed radio telescope? Just a thought...
Um honey you know that baby thing we're saving for... I was kidding, oh it turned blue, darn.
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
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.
Snickersnee3: Build your own 3-watt Luxeon Star headlamp from scratch
I remember looking for something that would allow me to hook up a radio to my PC (and be controlled by it) but at the time there were no PCI devices and the USB one's were FM only.
Anyone know of a AM/FM addon that's not ISA? (Oh, and not having to use my soundcard's linein would be nice.)
Or would this new card be it? If it's as low cost as they say maybe having shortwave and God knows what else wouldn't be such a bad thing...
Wiwi
"I trust in my abilities,
but I want more then they offer"
Crack a "Numbers" Station ... 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! "
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
Snickersnee3: Build your own 3-watt Luxeon Star headlamp from scratch
Some cordless phones transmit at 30MHz, and intercepting them is also illegal under the ECPA.
Call (206) 338-5780 COLLECT for information about a genuine BA, BS, MA, MS, MBA, or Ph.D.
Spectrum analyzers are designed to display a very large portion of the spectrum. Radios are designed to amplify a very small portion of the spectrum.
When was the last time you used your home sterero as a spectrum analyzer?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
It sounds interesting, but does it need that 64-bit PCI slot for throughput reasons, or simply for its shear weight?
DSP chips are expensive. We were paying $90 for an ASDP-2101 which runs at about 20Mhz. Why jack up the price for the consumer when you can significantly lower it by using software?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
why would i even bother?
for 300$ 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$?
Not to put anybody down, but if this is a card that must be installed in a computer, why then isn't the software executed on a small microprocessor on the card, relieving the main processor from having to mess with it? After all, this is how graphics boards are made faster, and come to think of it, even keyboards work this way, so why shouldn't every peripheral do its internal work in the peripheral?
I take it one of these could be used to recieve weather fax signals- does anyone know of any open source software/hardware projects that can re-build the weather maps from the A/D signal??
A laptop solution would be a quite useful for remote sites.
A simple search on freshmeat & sourceforge doesn't turn up anything.
What's weather fax?
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
1. Internal. This is the Winradio approach. The good news is that, as processors become faster and faster, they're able to absorb more of the electronics into software layers. The latest WinRadio is akin to all those Winmodems we've seen. However, the environment within a computer case isn't exactly the best place to put an RF circuit -- it's full of all kinds of strong fields and oddball harmonics.
2. External. A much nicer place to put your radio is in a nice RF tight box a few feet away from all that nonlinear harmonic crapola. And, after all, the output is relatively low bandwidth, so bring it into the system through an I/O port -- USB, 1394, heck even a serial port will do.
What you really want is an Icom PCR-1000, covers 100 kHz to 1.3 GHz (continuous if you shop in Akihabara), multimode. Hook it up to a serial port and an audio in jack, and you're all set to vacuum the ether.
Or, just check out the JavaRadio network of PCR-1000 equipped sites around the world...
...-.-
I'm not going to say that this PC shortwave reciever is better than some $1000 rig, but.. what I have noticed is that there's a trend geared towards integrating "things" into PCs and computers in general to make them cheaper and often times better.
A good example is an OBD-II scan tool used for diagnosing newer automobiles. If you were to buy a fully integrated stand-alone unit from some tool manufacturer you'd be looking at $600 on up to several thousands. But simply using a computer such as a palm OS based handheld and making an adapter and some software that can chew through the data stream from the OBD-II computer you can mkae yourself a scan tool. Having researched this I purchased one and was pleased to find out that I had essentially bought a $2500 scan tool for $250. Not factoring in the cost of my computer since everyone has 1 to 10 of those things anyways.
So, if a handheld computer can interface with my car and run diagnostics and read critical sensor data in real time for 10 times less what would be so hard about turning one into a radio for cheap? To simply put it, a radio is a capacior and an inductor. The value of one is varied to "tune in" to a certain frequency. Sure there's some A/D converter on this new pc card but that's not expensive. Would it seem so hard for a computer to take this digital data and do soemthing with it? No, it does that with a million of other things all the time(mouse, keyboard, digital camera, etc).
The point is that computers are powerful. More powerful than we realize I think. Combined with innovative ideas and software, they're making functions previously unimagined for a computer to do cheaper.
well why don't you post some links to thses reviews or fuck off dipshit
Something in that direction is the ICOM PCR-100 receiver (serial port for control, audio output for--audio). Unfortunately, open source software seems less common in the amateur radio and shortwave communities--people seem to come from a DOS world, which limits what you can do with many of the computer controllable receivers and radios. Still, there is some software, e.g., http://qsy.to/pcr/control.html.
"...the world's first dedicated shortwave receiver on a PC card."
Don't force it, get a bigger hammer. Or an editor. (It's that way on their site too...)
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Does anybody know if there are other applications for this kind of hardware except for listening to sound transmissions (radio/chatbox/intelligence)?
One of the things i could imagine is the DCF77 signal here in Europe (radio broadcast of atomic precision time at 77 kHz). Others might be GPS (although this probably is to complicated to do entirely in software).
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
Are you sure you are talking about the same product? The winradio cards I look at do all KINDS of neat digital decoding.
They will follow trunking, decode pager data, listen to digital transmission, decode satellite imagery, etcetera....
Does a Sony radio do that? Or even a grundig?
what you WANT is this: the main Winradio 1500i (too bad it's ISA... hmm. no pci cards?
The frequency range is 150 kHz to 1.5 GHz, and you can use all their fancy software to decode all kinds of things.
Of curse, being the Land of the Free, as stated on the site, "the US version excludes cellular frequencies 825-849 and 869- 894 MHz"
So order one from Canda and have it shipped down.
TenTec has had a similar product out for quite awhile. The RX-320 has been out for a couple of years, and (IMHO) is a much better solution. The RX-320 is an external general coverage receiver that is completely DSP based. I've had one of these for a couple of years and love it. TenTec even publishes a complete "programmer's guide and schematic" on their website, which includes the entire spec for controlling the radio. Using this spec, I've written control programs in C, PHP, PDP-8 assembler, and am now working on one in PDP-11 assembler.
The RX-320 is encased in a steel box and seems to be fairly impervious to RF interference, at least in my environment. It also doesn't take up a slot inside the pc which could be used for other things.
Whoops. It looks like tentec's web server is case sensitive. The correct URL for the schematics and programmers guide is http://www.tentec.com/RX320FTP/htm
As time wore on, programs written for the x80-CP/M environment were ported to the x86-DOS world because that's what was available, and most radio applications required what the PC gave you -- the whole machine. But, in all this time, there was never a heritage of code-sharing, since making a little money on the side allowed you to defray the costs of the hobby. That's one well-known characteristic of hams -- they're cheapskates by nature or pick it up as they go on -- and as a result many ham radio innovations are economic, not technical.
As more modern multitasking operating systems showed up, non-realtime apps have been ported to them, and some amazing semi-realtime DSP work has been done, such as the various PSK31 implementations. And many of these are at least of an Open philosophy -- almost all of the PSK31 implementations, for example, are based on a single core DLL produced under a "share and enjoy" license.
So indeed, amateur radio comes from the DOS world, and the Free Nuxis have a lot of catching up to do.
...-.-
When I was in college my fraternity had an antenna on the roof of the house connected to a receiver that let us listen in on analog cell phone and cordles phone conversations around campus and around town.
It is my understanding the the FCC prohibits the sale of devices (in the US) that pick up the frequencies needed to do this anymore.
Will this device tune into these prohibited frequencies? I admit I don't know the first thing about what things transmit on various frequencies. At the time we had a big frequency catalog that told us what channels to tune into to listen to cell phones, Air Force One, cordless phones, and many other interesting things.
Remember... ZG9uJ3QgZm9yZ2V0IHRvIGRyaW5rIHlvdXIgb3ZhbHRpbmU=
I know how triangulation 'works' but I don't know the specifics. How close do the three receivers have to be to get decent accuracy?
Having a nation wide network of PCs with these cards would allow you to triangulate pretty much any transmission. Just put your desired frequency into the network and coalate the data from your peers.
Cool stuff
.sig Karma out the wazoo, better to spend points elsewhere if this is above 2 or below 0
If they squish one of these things into a PCMCIA card, I would be happy!
In any case, would-be Australian buyers beware. They list suppliers on the site for all of the world except locals, then say "If you're from Australia or the Pacific Rim, you're welcome to buy direct from us".
But the prices in their online store are all in US dollars. How many Aussies have missed the fine print and been burned by this little bit of misleading? Not happy Jan.[1]
[1] Local joke. You had to be here (.au).
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Thus spake the master programmer:
"When you have learned to snatch the error code from
the trap frame, it will be time for you to leave."
-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"
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