The cheap and easy-to-use SDR dongle is a very powerful tool for learning radio technology. However, building your own SDR is not a problem that many hackers are confident to solve. [Ashhar Farhan, VU2ESE] Hope to pass Bitcoin, A hackable HF SDR transceiver designed around Raspberry Pi.
[Ashhar] The project was introduced at the virtual “Four Days of May” annual meeting of QRP International Amateur Radio Club. Watch the full speech in the video after the break. He first browsed the available open source SDR radios and then delved into his sBITX design decisions. One of the main goals of the project is to lower the barriers to entry. For this, he chose Raspberry Pi as the basis and wrote C code, anyone who has done a little Arduino programming should be able to understand and modify it. The hardware is designed to be as simple as possible. At the receiving end, a simple superheterodyne architecture is used to feed a 25 kHz wide segment of the RF spectrum to the audio codec, which sends the digitized audio to the Raspberry Pi. Then use FFT to demodulate the signal in software. For transmission, the signal is generated in software and then up-converted to the required radio frequency. [Ashhar] A GUI was also created for the 7-inch Raspberry Pi screen.
Currently sBITX is still in the development stage, and the information is spread between the videos after the break, and it is accompanied by PDF, This GitHub repository, and Threads on the Bitx20 group.
[Ashar Farhan] A low-cost radio design that is well known in the amateur radio community, such as BITX, its successor, μBITX. He also created Antuino, an Arduino-based antenna tester.