More About The Receiving Front End

I saw a picture which looks to me like an LNA connected to the dongle. Also on the main page it makes it sounds like you just need the SDR dongle. What I’m getting at is somewhere you need to show more of the receiving hardware with details. At least to know there’s more to it than an antenna and SDR dongle. Definitely with the components together. Of course now I can’t find that picture of them showing them laying next to each other. lol

Also, what frequency ranges are you talking about having to monitor?

Just checked the docs and you are right, I believe the LNA is a bit hidden in some blog posts but not on the main docs. I’ll come up with a fix for that this weekend. For the reference platform we use the LNA4ALL at http://lna4all.blogspot.com/

Frequency ranges depend on the station owner and what they would like to help capture. A lot of the signals are in the 70cm ham band while 2m comes a close second, so a combination of 144/440 antennas is most typical. Last weekend at Maker Faire we displayed a station that had 2 440 helicals (one RHCP the other LHCP). While there would need to be a switch to use them efficiently we don’t have that today… With a simple 2m/70cm you could combine both with a duplexer that sits before the LNA.

The LNA also depends on the SDR, most of them are pretty deaf and could use the signal boost. If you are using a ham radio instead the LNA may not be necessary, we’ve had good luck receiving straight off of the antennas.

No rush. But I am digging the LNA. I may need it with this SDR dongle. We’ve had rain since last thursday so I haven’t had any time to do any more tests.

To be honest I’m getting started in Ham. I’m supposed to take my test this month. But satellites sounds fun. So I have a ways to go but I’m a fast learner. Most of my work in electronics is in the non-rf realm. But that’s okay, it gives me a new area to learn and integrate with what I already know. I’m going to use an Arduino to control a DDS which will feed a transceiver. Then I can tune it to other frequencies than the single frequency the onboard crystal sets it to.