If you’ve been thinking about pulling the trigger on an Airspy product, now’s the time!
Airspy is once again offering huge discounts during their 2020 Black Friday promotion.
For example, their Airspy HF+ Discovery SDR–which I consider to be one of the best HF SDRs on the market–is 30% off ($119 US). This is a phenomenal deal on an amazing SDR!
The YouLoop antenna is only $20.97 US. Click here to read my review of the YouLoop.
That’s such a good deal, I’m contemplating the purchase of a second one.
Both the HF+ Discovery SDR and YouLoop are the major components of my portable SDR DXing kit. During the Black Friday sale, you can purchase both for $141 US! That’s much less than the normal price of the HF+ Discovery alone.
It seems all Airspy distributors are participating in the sale, so click here to find the distributor that ships to your part of the world.
[Just found out the Frugal Radio channel also discovered this sale!]
I certainly didn’t need one but bought one and a You-Loop anyway. I’m not even sure my old computer can run this software and SDR. I will eventually have a nice quiet location where I can use this.
Thanks for the tip, Thomas. Wondering if any SWLing readers use this gear with a Mac, and if so, what’s the best software?
73,
NT
I also bought four through airspy.us during the sale. I had my misgivings because of past commentators who suggested airspy.us has poor stocking practice leading to one month delays. I happen to have a four way splitter with PSC-4-6 and ferrite isolation transformers off ebay. My intended use is possibly to experiment with making a youloop array and trying various things.
A friend of mine who runs the hisunauto chinese e-commerce platform, which sells a modified circuit similar to MLA-30 called the AMLA150, also sent me a youloop clone to test which suffered from issues involving the SMA connectors after brief use. I am concerned that this may be an issue with the youloop in general, even the OEM. I discovered that galvanic isolation at the SDR feedpoint was just as mandatory to control noise as when a LNA-driven active wideband loop was used, and I advise anyone intending to use the youloop to obtain either the cross-country wireless or the bonito galvanic isolator/over voltage protector as they are very effective at attenuating noise at the feedpoint. I also discovered experimentally results validating one major concern a lot of ham enthusiasts seem to have with the youloop and with shielded loops in general. Even though they boast tremendously lower noise levels(my testing concluded S0-S1 across all bands background noise), they also correspondingly attenuate signal. In some cases, even with a great amount of gain applied. it is not possible to recover the signal, and the antenna is inferior for those signals to wideband amplifed unshielded loops or other antenna designs.
I have emailed Youssef because I happen to understand they are working on an amplifier for the loop, and i wonder if we would not be better served by a custom non-foster network. The principle physics limiting shielded loop effectiveness seem like they might be counteracted better by a non-foster network than by an amplification circuit.
I couldn’t help myself either! Bought an HF Discovery, *4* (the max) YouLoops because of their proven VLF coverage, and misc cables & ferrite. I’ve wanted a YouLoop for a long time now after I saw how it works on VLF but couldn’t justify the cost of buying a receiver for free shipping and paying shipping made them too pricey for me: this deal is just right!
Now I just need a nose-free area to try them out. I already have several other receivers including a RSP2, original RSP, and several HF transceivers (IC-7100, 9100, TS-850). What I can’t use I can probably sell for profit at that price, but we’ll see.
i may not be a licensed ham but i think we both got screwed. you likely have your antennas by now and have noted they both couple to nearby noise sources as well as attenuate noise when you grab the feedline. The feedline is the antenna. The balun is shorted feedline to ground and shield which may be correct per the diagram but is a major nono that completely defeats the purpose of shielding the loop.
Great article. I took advantage of the Black Friday sale prices and bought the Airspy HF+ and the loop antenna. Can’t wait to put them to use. We have lots of large open parks in the Greensboro area. Hope you have a great holiday season!
73s
Bob W4EGJ
Does anyone know if they sell to the US through someone other that airspy.us? Any dealers? I’d still like to try one but after last year’s failure I will not go through that again.
Not sure of airspy.us’s history but they had both the YouLoop and the HF+ Discovery in my hands in 4 days. Hopefully they got their act together moving forward.
In a nutshell, my Airspy was removed from the shipping box and replaced with styrofoam peanuts before it even got to my mailbox. Since they had “proof of delivery” they were pretty much “done with me. I had to file all the claims stuff with the USPS even though they were the ones that contracted with USPS to deliver the package. They used USPS Priority mail which insures to $100 which might cover their cost for the unit but didn’t cover my cost for the unit. My last correspondence with this was asking for some record of insuring it for the full value. They said “they would check” but never responded. I just took the $100 from the USPS claim before the time ran out and was out $33 or so. That being said I can’t give airspy.us any more of my money. If they some day chose to deal with a reputable retailer or something I’d be willing to try again. I hear nothing but great things about the products.
Thomas- Thanks. I jumped on this deal like a fat rat. Total was $154.xx including US shipping from AIRSPY.us. Looking forward to experimenting with it. In fact, just downloaded the software and am playing with the online AIRSPY nodes now.
You’re in for a treat, Rick! 🙂
It showed up this morning. I had already gotten SDR# installed so it was basically plug and play. There may be a pretty steep learning curve to getting all of the potential out of this thing but I was listening to BCB AM, FM and SW within 10 minutes.
Next move is to integrate it into my shack as a second receiver for amateur radio so I can work on getting my noise levels under control here.
Thanks as always for the useful tip, Thomas!