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Shortwave Radio and The PC

Posted by Hemos on from the car-54-where-are-you dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Ars Technica has an indepth guide on the Ten Tec RX-320, a shortwave radio receiver that connects to the PC and is controlled by software (both Linux and Windows). The article goes into depth on different high frequency modes, broadcast shortwave, and even a bit on ham radio and new digital modes."

1 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. Re:SW is not Dead! (Yet) by patchmaster · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Hang on, then why the hell would I want to attach one to a PC? Surely even the pleasure of DXing doesn't get augmented with use of the PC.
    Believe it or not, the radio interface -- all the switches, dials, and displays -- add a LOT to the cost of the radio. By hooking your computer up to a black box with nothing but an ON/OFF switch, you use something you already have for the interface and save a lot of money on the radio. The RX-320 would probably cost twice as much if it had all the standard dials and displays.

    The pleasure of listening to SW can be increased considerably with the use of the PC. You can download extensive lists of station broadcast schedules and easily program the radio to try all the known frequencies for a particular broadcaster before settling on the best one. If I want to listen to the BBC, I can quickly pull up all the current BBC freqs and try them all. One day I may get a better signal from the Caribbean, the next I get a better signal from Singapore. This setup makes it easy to try them all.

    It's also great for identifying those rare catches when you're really DXing. Push a button and the software tells you which stations are scheduled to be broadcasting on that freq at the moment. It's nothing you couldn't do by flipping through books and pages of notes, but it's a whole lot easier and faster.

    There are also signal processing programs that can clean up noisy signals that the typical notch filter and passband tuning just can't handle. You're not going to get that kind of processing without passing the signal through a computer. And as long as you're using the computer anyway, might as well control the radio with it.