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I’ve been getting interested in software defined radios a lot the last couple of months and I’ve spent lots of time reading up on the subject and its really starting to make me tick!

Sadly being a student and living off loans etc I really cant justify spending nearly over £1,000 on a radio, I’ve got to make do with doing things on the cheap! So SoftRock receiver was looking a very good option, at around £8 including postage and packing to the United Kingdom.

As my vision is really rubbish to put it nicely I was going to need to enlist some help to get this SMT kit working so a friend kindly agreed to help me put it together! Within two days we had the whole kit nearly complete all that’s left to do is add the coax cable and the audio lead (we need to get some!) I’ve also got a nice aluminium box for it along with power poles, switches, plugs and I’m also thinking about adding the option to add a battery into the box and a fancy on/off switch with a led.

As software defined radios rely on the soundcard I also started looking into external soundcards which will supply 96kHz, I know my laptop will do 48kHz so as soon as it was built I have something to work with but on a visit to PC World a found a creative external USB soundcard which could do the 96kHz so I picked it up before I forgot all about it! Plus this unit will come in handy while I’m at university as I’m also doing digital audio production as a module.

Hopefully within the next week it will be all finished and working! But don’t keep your hopes up I’m off university again sick.