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General Radio Discussion / Re: Dumb it down for this crusty, 72 year old fart still, for the most part, living
« on: September 29, 2021, 0830 UTC »
If you've got an R8, you probably have all the radio you need. Most of the broadcast DX activity is on MW, and the Drake R8 is the standard for MW. SDRs have a fancy display and a few features the R8 might not have, but an R8 is hard to beat.
SW has been mostly half-dead since the solar cycle dipped about 5-6 years ago. Some nights and mornings there is still much to hear, and if you're in the PNW (WA, OR, etc.), you'll hear Asia many (if not most) mornings on 41, 49, and 31 meters -- reception of those stations, of course, will vary because of the low solar cycle. But aside from the occasional nights where SW is actually working well, MW is the place to be for DX.
"SDR", technically, is "software defined radio". In other words, a chip in the radio has software inside it that acts as a radio processor -- these chips that contain this sort of software are also often called "DSP chips". They replace the analog IF chips in radios which were standard from the mid 1970s to the late 2000s. My Sangean AM-FM radio (a PR-D5) that is playing South Asian music from 100-200 km away right now as I type this, has a DSP chip inside. The processing of the signal I am hearing wasn't done via the superhet, analog method that IF chips used. The DSP chip instead is doing all that via digital processing software.
Your average DSP radio chip has an RF amp inside, along with an analog to digital converter; software that tunes, filters, decodes, etc,; which then goes into a digital-to-analog converter, which is sent to an audio chip.
An "SDR" in usual parlance is a computer program that runs on a laptop or desktop computer that uses the same sort of chip but has an interface that puts it all up on a fancy looking screen with virtual buttons and a 'waterfall' display.
Hope this helps in some way.
SW has been mostly half-dead since the solar cycle dipped about 5-6 years ago. Some nights and mornings there is still much to hear, and if you're in the PNW (WA, OR, etc.), you'll hear Asia many (if not most) mornings on 41, 49, and 31 meters -- reception of those stations, of course, will vary because of the low solar cycle. But aside from the occasional nights where SW is actually working well, MW is the place to be for DX.
"SDR", technically, is "software defined radio". In other words, a chip in the radio has software inside it that acts as a radio processor -- these chips that contain this sort of software are also often called "DSP chips". They replace the analog IF chips in radios which were standard from the mid 1970s to the late 2000s. My Sangean AM-FM radio (a PR-D5) that is playing South Asian music from 100-200 km away right now as I type this, has a DSP chip inside. The processing of the signal I am hearing wasn't done via the superhet, analog method that IF chips used. The DSP chip instead is doing all that via digital processing software.
Your average DSP radio chip has an RF amp inside, along with an analog to digital converter; software that tunes, filters, decodes, etc,; which then goes into a digital-to-analog converter, which is sent to an audio chip.
An "SDR" in usual parlance is a computer program that runs on a laptop or desktop computer that uses the same sort of chip but has an interface that puts it all up on a fancy looking screen with virtual buttons and a 'waterfall' display.
Hope this helps in some way.