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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.
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
ham radio buffs are a thing of the past
i s. html
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/mircris
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.
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.
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$?