First Renderings of the Airspy HF+ Revealed
Back in February of this year we first heard about the Airspy HF+, which is an upcoming product from the Airspy team that is intended to be a high performance HF receiver at a low price. Over on the Airspy HF+ website the first (rendered) image of the unit has recently been released. We’ve also managed to get some additional renderings from the Airspy team which we show in the image slider below.
The enclosure is CNC carved aluminum with two SMA ports on one side, and a USB port on the rear. Since the HF+ actually has the capability to tune up to 260 MHz it uses two SMA inputs, one for an HF antenna and one for a VHF antenna. Inside the RF circuit is shielded again with a shielding can to protect it from USB noise.
The tweet below also appears to show some grounding improvements made to reduce USB noise.
The Airspy HF+ is also the result of a long learning journey and a great attention to details. USB noise is past! cc @ITeadstudio pic.twitter.com/6RJykinRWq
— prog' (@lambdaprog) June 14, 2017
Other recent tweets from prog (the creator of the Airspy HF+) indicate that the hardware is ready, and show that streaming from with SpyServer from a RPi3 is functional. Hopefully we should be seeing this unit release for sale soon.
Digital modes FTW. Streaming from Airspy HF+ and RPi3 pic.twitter.com/F9L0ctWa9O
— prog’ (@lambdaprog) June 4, 2017
Please! Please stop installing this crazy long SMA connectors. Please install SMA connectors of normal length. Now it looks very ugly! By standard, you must provide 0.128 inch (5.5 mm) of thread as minimum, but not half of inch as Chinese guys like. This rendering shows 12 mm or something. Looks ugly!
New to the SDR# expanding software portfolio after SpectrumSpy and AstroSpy is SpyServer. I’ve tried it. It adds ultra smooth client-server operation from remote SDR’s to SDR# as client. In “full IQ” streaming you can even record and DSP-process the IQ BW at the client side and view it with very high RBW. Looking at the specs the HF+ together with SpyServer will make a great sensitive, high DR, low noise, HF/VHF receiver to use in remote low-noise locations. It’s got less range than your avarage 10USD dongle but will have incomparable DX capabilities in the range it has, meeting the RF quality of much more expensive SDRs. Looking forward to it!
No external clock input? I was really looking forward to that capability. Guess it’s the old Airspy for me. Sigh.
I was worried this premium 18bit performance would come in cheap plastic or cheap aluminium like the ridiculous 12bit SDR’s.
What’s the big deal about this? How will its price compare to SDRplay RSP2? RSP2 covers 1 kHz – 2 GHz and this only does DC – 260 MHz. If Airspy has nearly 1.8 GHz of coverage and sells for $169, will HF+ with its 260 MHz of coverage (15% of Airspy) be 85% less than the price of the Airspy? SDR# has no squelch for SSB so why use that for shortwave?
The HF+ is 18-bits, so it should have high dynamic range and not overload easily. Probably going to be good for DXers.
(8-bit is a dynamic range of 49.92 dB)
12-bit is a dynamic range of 74 dB
18-bit is a dynamic range of 110.12 dB
That extra 36 dB of dynamic range (6-bits), could potentially translate into seeing RF signals from 64 times as far away, if there are strong signals nearby that were preventing you from simply using increasing gain. Yes you could add additional filtering (which also adds additional attenuation), to get better performance out of 12-bit or 8-bit hardware. But you can also do that with 18-bits and get even more performance. I’m looking forward to seeing what the reviews have to say about this.
I’ve no idea what the planned price is but I for one would love if the hardware was cheaper than the existing 12-bit offerings.