A $20 Software Defined Radio For GNU Radio 53
An anonymous reader writes "Dr. Dobb's shows how to take a $20 USB TV dongle and use it as a wide-range software defined radio using GNU Radio."
See also the OscomSDR project, and SDR#, an MIT licensed program for debugging software defined radios.
Going up... (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, inflation is really hitting these things...
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/03/31/1914217/software-defined-radio-for-11 [slashdot.org]
Wow, dog. (Score:4, Insightful)
So, they made a radio out of a radio. And it only cost as much as a radio! How impressive!
Re:Going up... (Score:4, Insightful)
Limitations aside, cheap hardware lets people get their hands dirty and understand the software. I am pretty ignorant of this stuff but interested in it. $20 is peanuts and having software explained for it is helpful. Perhaps users playing with the cheap stuff will become interested in it enough to spring for more expensive gear? As it stands now I wouldn't spend hundreds (I want to build other things too!) on an SDR I might not get much use out of but $20 is certainly doable.
What seems strange to me is that these TV tuners are out there cheap with all of this bandwidth but no one seems to build more dedicated tuners just for hacking around using the same stuff. Surely if someone knew what they were doing they could design something from these and sell it cheap for people to play with? Could they perhaps make some cheap design decisions that would make them more useful without breaking the bank?