[alokm]

Are there any existing reliable alternatives?

[SigmundA]

If you want to try this stuff out cheap, then get a DVB-T dongle that works with RTL-SDR:

http://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr http://www.nooelec.com/store/tv28tv2.html

bladeRf, USRP and now HackRF are def a step up but big difference in cost.

There is also http://www.RFSpace.com, http://www.Winradio.com and http://www.flex-radio.com for commercial offerings.

[VLM]

For real usable ham radio SDR there's always

http://fivedash.com/

aka the former kb9yig operation.

I have a liteII combined kit built for 30 meters. Works pretty well! Wide enough BW that with a 192K sound card (or was it 96K?) I would listen to one of the aircraft weather transmitters.

Note this is narrowband low frequency rx and tx gear, whereas there's two separate "cultures" of SDR people and one lives to demod wifi and the other lives to do advanced DSP on 160 meters or whatever. And the two don't often meet.

[est]

BladeRF, USRP

[anExcitedBeast]

BladeRF looks pretty awesome.

[fdb]

Myriad-RF is also an open-source project. It costs $299 and supports frequencies between 260MHz and 3.8GHz.

http://myriadrf.org/