SiDRadio: RTL-SDR Kit including Preselector & Upconverter
The Australian Silicon Chip magazine has written an article about a kitset for a 100KHz to 2 GHz receiver based on the RTL-SDR that they are selling. Note, you will need to pay in order to be able to read the entire article.
Completing the kit gives you a radio with two antenna inputs, a 5-band preselector, an RF amplifier and an upconverter for the HF bands.
This is similar to something I’m setting up for my fishing boat next year using an TRTL and Ham It Up HF converter. I was going to leave the front end open and use a variation of the PA0RDT Mini Whip for HF and the onboard Marine Band antenna for the VHF which should give be most of the band so I can find signals easier. Current radio only scans 3 channels and 2 of them are preset.
I’m tempted to embed a striped RTL dongle in my homebrew Chartplotter/Depth Mapping setup just so I can say it has a Marine Band monitor and NOAA weather radio built in, just attach an antenna. I’d also like to use one with my Nexus 7 and a yagi cut for 433 Mhz and see if I can find some fish tagged by the DNR (I’m on the Upper Mississippi River in Iowa) I’m not even sure what I’m looking for as to a signal and having a bandscope will help a lot compared to using an Icom PCR-100 like I was thinking of trying.
How cool! Wish it went up to 3Ghz.
They were nice enough to include the full text of the article in the source code of the web page. Obviously if you’re going to build one you should buy the article so you can get all the diagrams etc.
http://pastebin.com/UU25gPMw
these two overlapping paths at the relay…
argh. why they just don’t v-flip the damn thing