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The ELAD FDM-S3 was first announced last year, but has only recently started shipping. We know its processing bandwidth is impressive–wide enough to include the entire FM broadcast band! The price is 949.90 EUR.
ELAD has also introduced a matching amplified speaker–the SP1:
If I owned an FDM-DUO transceiver, I would grab this matching speaker! Knowing ELAD, I imagine the audio is impressive. The price of the SP-1 is 140.30 EUR.
And finally, ELAD has also posted a photo of what appears to be a new amplifier:
I have no details about the SP1 speaker or DUO-ART amplifier–and few details about the FDM-S3–but I will meet with ELAD at the 2018 Hamvention in a few days and gather more details.
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Ivan Cholakov (NO2CW), who shares the following:
Thomas, there has been a lot of discussions regarding Airspy HF+ ever since it came out – heated exchanges regarding comparisons with peers, modifications and firmware updates.
I took my Airspy HF+ and conducted two tests with it:
Airspy HF+ vs. SDRPlay RSP-1A on HF and Medium Wave
Since I could not completely equalize the audio levels, I think it’s good to look at the peak to valley ratios on the display rather than the audio volume.
Many thanks, Ivan, for sharing these comparison tests! I agree with you that it’s most helpful to look closely at the peak to valley ratios on the spectrum display rather than using the audio levels as a measure.
Steve Andrews contacted the SDRplay forum recently to share ideas for a new Spectrum Analyser tool for use with SDRplay RSPs. A lively discussion started, with a lot of enthusiasm and encouragement from the user community, for something optimised for these devices. Steve is progressing well with the software development and hopes to have an Alpha release of the basic tool available during May. You can follow the discussion, review progress and add your comments by joining the SDRplay forum and going to: https://www.sdrplay.com/community/viewforum.php?f=12 where we have created a section especially for the Spectrum Analyser topic.
Front page of the North Korean newspaper “Rodong” on April 28, 2018. (Source: Mark Fahey)
With North Korea in the global spotlight, I’ve been making every effort to listen to the Voice of Korea on shortwave. Unfortunately, from here on the east coast of North America, conditions have simply not been in my favor.
Fortunately, a couple of SWLing Post and SRAA contributors have had my back.
Yesterday, Richard Langley, uploaded a great VOK recording made with the U Twente WebSDR on April 28 at 13:30 UTC on 13760 kHz. Thank you Richard!
This morning, North Korean propaganda specialist Mark Fahey uploaded the following VOK recording to the archive and included notes and insight:
[The recording is] off 9,730 kHz so a mint shortwave file.
Recorded at the “Behind The Curtain” remote satellite and HF receiving site near Taipei, Taiwan (the site is remotely operated from Freemans Reach in Australia and was specifically established to monitor North Korean radio & television 24×7).
Remote Module #2 fully weather sealed and ready to deploy.
[…]I must say getting a good recording off shortwave is quite a challenge, just going to their satellite circuits far easier!
[T]he reason for the almost hi-fi quality is that I used the real-time audio enhancement and noise reduction techniques I presented at the Winter SWL Fest. The signal in reality was much noisier:
[I] also have long domestic recordings (which is what I have been focusing on rather than VOK).
[…]Of course domestic in Korean – but that has been my main interest/monitoring – what does the regime say to the domestic audience–?
They seem quite serious (I mean genuine) even acknowledging South Korea as a separate place and Moon being the president of this place. The domestic propaganda now not hiding the fact that South Korea is a separate sovereign nation, which is very un-North Korean propaganda!
The news is still kind of breaking in North Korea and the radio reflects that – the reports sound like Friday was yesterday. It takes a long time for North Korean media to report anything, so news from 3 days ago is presented as if it only happened 3 hours ago.
Also since it’s all topical I will include a YouTube link to a Voice Of Korea Documentary (propaganda to our ears of course–!) that has recently been posted to the Arabia Chapter of The Korean Friendship Association:
Back in March of this year we posted about Nexmon SDR which is code that you can use to turn a Broadcom BCM4339 802.11ac WiFi chip into a TX capable SDR that is capable of transmitting any arbitrary signal from IQ data within the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz WiFi bands. In commercial devices the BCM4339 was most commonly found in the Nexus 5 smartphone.
Recently Nexmon have tweeted that their code now supports the BCM43455c0 which is the WiFi chip used in the recently released Raspberry Pi 3B+. They write that the previous Raspberry Pi 3B (non-plus) cannot be used with Nexmon as it only has 802.11n, but since the 3B+ has 802.11ac Nexmon is compatible.
Combined with RPiTX which is a Raspberry Pi tool for transmitting arbitrary RF signals using a GPIO pin between 5 kHz to 1500 MHz, the Raspberry Pi 3B+ may end up becoming a versatile low cost TX SDR just on it’s own.[…]
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Tudor Vedeanu, who has kindly shared details about his portable Raspberry Pi system which now can run the AirSpy HF+ SDR.
Tudor writes:
I bought the RPi to use it as a Spyserver for my Airspy HF+ SDR.
My main radio listening location is a small house located on a hill outside the city and there is no power grid there (it’s a radio heaven!), so everything has to run on batteries and consume as little power as possible.
My first tests showed that the Raspberry Pi works very well as a Spyserver: the CPU usage stays below 40% and the power consumption is low enough to allow it to run for several hours on a regular USB power bank. If I add a 4G internet connection there I could leave the Spyserver running and connect to it remotely from home.
Then I wondered if the Raspberry Pi would be powerful enough to run a SDR client app. All I needed was a portable screen so I bought the official 7” touchscreen for the RPi.
I installed Gqrx, which offers support for the Airspy HF+. I’m happy to say it works better than I expected, even though Gqrx wasn’t designed to work on such a small screen. The CPU usage is higher than in Spyserver mode (70-80%) but the performance is good. Using a 13000 mAh power bank I get about 3.5 hours of radio listening.
This is fantastic, Tudor. Thanks for taking the time to put together a video for us. I’ve just ordered the latest Raspberry Pi 3 (Model B+). It has slightly more horsepower than the previous Pi3. Tudor, you’ve inspired me to grab the 7″ touch display as well and try my hand at running the AirSpy HF+ portable.
I’m not sure if the Raspberry Pi 3 will be able to record spectrum without hiccups, but it’s certainly worth a try.
As you tweak your system, please keep us in the loop!
Introducing CATSync – The new CAT tool for WebSDRs
Oscar, DJ0MY, has developed a new software tool for radio amateurs and SWLs.
CATSync allows the user to control public WebSDR receivers with a real rig connected via CAT. It supports the classical Web-SDR servers as well as the newer Kiwi SDR servers publically available on the internet.
This gives you access to dozens of web based receivers with the comfort of tuning your rig at home. This software helps you to bring you back into the fun of ham radio when you are suffering from local temporary or permanent high noise levels in an urban QTH location.
The software has the following features:
Synchronizes any public WebSDR server with your real RIG…
Supports a wide number of RIG’s (it uses the popular OmniRig engine)
Supports WebSDR and KiwiSDR browser based SDR receivers
Tune the VFO of your radio and see the web SDR follow in real time !
Switch modes (SSB, CW, etc.) on your radio and see the web SDR switch mode in real time.
Listen to the same frequency as your rig via web SDR
Ideally suited e.g. for people suffering from local QRM
Can track RX or TX VFO (e.g. to find that split of a DX station) if radio CAT supports both simultaneously
Can be interfaced with popular logging software using OminRig or via VSPE port splitter
