[Discuss-gnuradio] radio front end ?

[Stephen Nichols]

Hi,

I saw the blurb about this project on slashdot a few weeks ago. I've had my
amateur radio license for a few years (KG5XK) and have started playing with
a lot of the digital modes. So something like this holds a lot of interest
for me.

I've have not read all of the archived messages yet so forgive me if I'm
asking questions that have already been answered. What do most people use to
get signal samples? I did a web search for radios that output their IF
signal and found several. Most of them cost $$$$. I found a couple that were
digital and output the digital IF samples. Those were very costly. I found a
few others that output their analog IF signal. If you were to take one of
those and then sample the IF would that work ok? You don't just feed a
signal from an antenna into an a/d card in a pc do you? I was looking at
http://www.winradio.com and they have a few models of a radio on a card that
look interesting. One of them has provisions for you to provide your own dsp
functions. I think that one is very costly though. So I was just wondering
what the best (best being a combination of low/moderate cost and good
performance) method was to get access to real  signal samples.

stephen nichols