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Getting Started With GNU Radio (hackaday.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Software Defined Radio must be hard to create, right? Tools like GNU Radio and GNU Radio Companion make it much easier to build radios that can tune AM, FM, and even many digital modes. Of course, you need some kind of radio hardware, right? Not exactly. Hackaday has one of their video hands on tutorials about how to use GNU Radio with no extra hardware (or, optionally, a sound card that you probably already have). The catch? Well, you can't do real radio that way, but you can learn the basics and do audio DSP. The next installment promises to use some real SDR hardware and build an actual radio. But if you ever wanted to see if it was worth buying SDR hardware, this is a good way to see how you like working with GNU Radio before you spend any money.
You piqued my curiosity so I plugged the part numbers for the ICs into eBay and got back the same thing for ten bucks shipped. If I were already doing a newegg order, though, I might well toss one in from them so as to get it this month.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
yeah i got something similar, i researched the chipset a bit in advance, to see what frequencies it could do. i found one that could go from i think it was... like... 100 mhz through to almost 1900mhz, with a bandwidth of something like... 2.8m-samples/sec. it only had an 8-bit ADC resolution but that was ok. i then used it with some software i was working with, at the time (passive GSM scanning software), and actually managed to find a couple of frequencies, which was amazing.
going beyond that would have been tricky, because at the limit of 2.8 million samples per second of I and Q data @ 8 bit, it was pushing the limit of what the hardware could actually do: there were quite a few drop-outs. i'm sure the proprietary driver could handle that data rate, but the reverse-engineered gnu/linux one simply couldn't.
anyway yes absolutely! $12 plus shipping for something that will handle a huge range of frequencies, FM radio, TV frequencies, GPS satellites, GSM 850 and 900mhz, and even some of the higher-end GSM frequencies @ 1800mhz... maan, what more could you ask for? :)