[SigmundA]

Yeah I am annoyed at the separation in SDR hardware most seem to be 0-30Mhz or 30Mhz and up.

HackRf is even offering a Ham-it-up upconverter to go with, the same one you would use with a DVB-T dongle. This gets you into the lower range but uses a mechanical switch to engage. Would really like soft control of it and be more integrated into the design. I might even try to wire a relay in to a Ham-it-up along with a raspberry pi for a integrated device that can go below 30Mhz with IP based connection.

[xradionut]

That's the nature of the RF business. Most folks are interested in one (<= HF), or the other (> HF), or have money for equipment that handles both. Building good equipment that handles the full spectrum is challenging.

[nanospider]

http://thinkrf.com/wsa5000/

[patrickyeon]

Building that one was challenging too (I used to do RF work for thinkRF). Going back through history, they started off with something that would only cover a specific band (say wifi, or specific cell bands). Then we did the 0440 (400MHz-4GHz), then the 0108 (10MHz-8GHz). There are all kinds of difficulties that come in to making and RF front-end that'll cover all of that bandwidth (we also did amplification and filtering to get better quality reception).

You'll also note the prices, and that those are receive-only devices. Some of the reason the price is so high is that we did all the RF design in-house, designing to our specs. A lot of the cheaper boards out there have less amplification, no (or too little) filtering, and use an integrated LO/mixer/digitizer/baseband chip, which limits them to the specs that chip can handle.

[xradionut]

I wonder how hard it would be to modify PyRF for another SDR?

[patrickyeon]

That's all stuff that happened after I left, but I would bet "not hard at all", if you can implement a controller that presents the same API as https://github.com/pyrf/pyrf/blob/master/pyrf/devices/thinkr...