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Current Feature Articles   Nov 06 Surfin': Homebrewing Today   Nov 05 DX the Hard Way   Nov 02 ARRL In Action: What Have We Been Up to Lately?   Nov 01 It Seems to Us: It Doesn't Just Happen   Oct 30 Surfin': Mapping Up   Oct 27 Amateur Radio Quiz: Assault'n Batteries   Oct 23 Surfin': Remembering the Woodpecker   Oct 22 The Amateur Amateur: A Soggy, Foggy, Doggy Demo in the Park   Oct 17 Youth@HamRadio.Fun: A Scouting Marathon   Oct 16 Pizza, Macaroni and a Cheeseburger ARRL Products: History/Adventure (More) Full Circle: A Dream Denied, A Vision Fulfilled -- Now Shipping! -- A heart felt story which will fascinate anyone interested in radio, communications, and music. Don C. Wallace: W6AM, Amateur Radio's Pioneer -- This book traces the life of Don Wallace and with it the early history of Amateur Radio. TEN-TEC: The First 40 Years 1968-2008 -- An exciting glimpse of Ten-Tec's first 40 years in the world of communications. 50 Years of Amateur Radio Innovation -- This guided tour of more than 400 legendary radios from 1930 to 1980, depicts the “golden age” of American radio technology. Edgar Harrison -- Now Shipping! -- A remarkable story of Edgar Harrison and the extraordinary adventures he encountered throughout World War II.

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This week, check out Web sites where radio software is eliminating some radio hardware.

This year, the buzz at the Dayton Hamvention® was SDR (software-defined radio). At the Hamvention, there were forums that focused on SDR and a variety of vendors showed new SDRs.

According to Wikipedia, “A software-defined radio (SDR) system is a radio communication system that can tune to any frequency band and receive any modulation across a large frequency spectrum by means of programmable hardware that is controlled by software.

“An SDR performs significant amounts of signal processing in a general purpose computer or a reconfigurable piece of digital electronics. The goal of this design is to produce a radio that can receive and transmit a new form of radio protocol just by running new software.”

The new SDRs at the Hamvention were FlexRadio's FLEX-5000 and TAPR’s HPSDR (High Performance Software Defined Radio). Not at the Hamvention, but very present on the ham SDR scene are GNU Radio and AmQRP.org’s SoftRock-40.

I am on the Board of Directors of TAPR. I spent most of Hamvention Friday and Saturday manning the TAPR booth, and it seemed to me that more than half of the people visiting our booth were asking about SDR. When I wasn't manning the booth and able to prowl the rest of the Hamvention, I could not help notice the crowd at FlexRadio’s booth.

For more information on this fascinating cutting-edge technology, also check out the ARRLWeb’s Software Defined Radio and HPSDR — High Performance Software Defined Radio Web pages.

Until next time, keep on surfin’.

Editor’s note: Stan Horzepa, WA1LOU, is currently looking for an SDR that matches his radio interests. To discuss SDRs, software, hardware and other cool stuff, send him an e-mail or add comments to his blog. By the way, every installment of Surfin’ is indexed here, so go look it up (whatever it may be).

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