mcHF SDR Radio Project
M0AKA has designed a unique software defined radio. He's been selling kits, and bare boards for a while now and there is a group up on Yahoo devoted to supporting the project. The rig looks like a KX3 in general appearance, though it's far from being a true copy of it. You can read about the radio up on Chris's site:
http://www.m0nka.co.uk/
I've sorta given up on the Pic-a-star project. I had managed to build and test the DSP unit, and get the IF board wired up, but there was still a lot of other parts that needed to be assembled and tested as well. Then my PIC programmer died on me (well actually Microchip no longer supports the PICkit2 anymore). Even worse, the PC support software was never ported to Linux, and attempts at getting Windows to work properly under a VM to support the Delphi environment was another issue. Mind you the 'Star is a wonder radio, but it's also getting rather long in the tooth these days with many of the critical parts now EOL. The mcHF looks rather easy to get up and running compared to the 'Star at this point, and it's state of the art.
So I bought myself a set of boards and I've just started to order parts to populate it. The photo above that I've linked to is the front side of a bare Ui (user interface) board. There are two boards in this radio, the other one is the RF board. Some hams have only purchased the Ui board, and are using a SoftRock for the RF deck. That was actually how Chris designed the original project. The radio uses an STM Arm M4F series processor, which has basic DSP instructions. This single CPU does all of the work, DSP, User interface, and basic controls. The KX3 has two processors, one for the Ui, and the other for the DSP duties. This does give the KX3 an edge in abilities, but the mcHF looks like a wonderful platform to cut one's eyeteeth on SDR technology, and the ARM M4F processor is easier to work with than the AD DSP Blackfin used in the KX3.
I don't have anything to post here yet but I will update this page as I work on the project.
http://www.m0nka.co.uk/
I've sorta given up on the Pic-a-star project. I had managed to build and test the DSP unit, and get the IF board wired up, but there was still a lot of other parts that needed to be assembled and tested as well. Then my PIC programmer died on me (well actually Microchip no longer supports the PICkit2 anymore). Even worse, the PC support software was never ported to Linux, and attempts at getting Windows to work properly under a VM to support the Delphi environment was another issue. Mind you the 'Star is a wonder radio, but it's also getting rather long in the tooth these days with many of the critical parts now EOL. The mcHF looks rather easy to get up and running compared to the 'Star at this point, and it's state of the art.
So I bought myself a set of boards and I've just started to order parts to populate it. The photo above that I've linked to is the front side of a bare Ui (user interface) board. There are two boards in this radio, the other one is the RF board. Some hams have only purchased the Ui board, and are using a SoftRock for the RF deck. That was actually how Chris designed the original project. The radio uses an STM Arm M4F series processor, which has basic DSP instructions. This single CPU does all of the work, DSP, User interface, and basic controls. The KX3 has two processors, one for the Ui, and the other for the DSP duties. This does give the KX3 an edge in abilities, but the mcHF looks like a wonderful platform to cut one's eyeteeth on SDR technology, and the ARM M4F processor is easier to work with than the AD DSP Blackfin used in the KX3.
I don't have anything to post here yet but I will update this page as I work on the project.