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  • Author Author: vk3kbr
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sdr

vk3kbr

Hello all at El14.  Regarding the SDR project, I wonder how much is "not expensive", I would like to get into a project like this, so to start with, what is the price of the SDR Experiment Board v1.0 ?

Then I might work on the price for all the bits and pieces.

Thank you,

Rod. VK3KBR

  • Hi Rodney,

     

    If you're referring to that project, then for the PCB, it can be ordered from any PCB manufacturer such as JLCPCB, Elecrow, OSH Park and so on. Most of the manufacturers have the same order process (click to enlarge the screenshots below):

    1. Navigate to their website and click the Quote button:

    image

    2. Click to upload the PCB design files (zip file)

    image

    3. Click 'Add to Cart'

    image

    It's about $2 USD for the SDR board. When you go to the online shopping cart, you'll see the shipping costs for your region.

     

    The entire project has a few tens of $ of parts (and some optional things can be left unpopulated such as the filter section), but shipping costs can blow things out of proportion if those are the only parts being ordered, since three sets of shipping costs are involved: shipping for the PCB, shipping for the components, and shipping for the SD5400CY IC which is only available from a few distributors (Future Electronics and Digikey have that in stock, it's low-cost at Future at £1.10 each, but very high cost at Digikey at $5 each - and Digikey have a minimum order of 10 for those, as a result it is not practical to use Digikey for that)

     

    The project also needs an oscillator source (say ideally a signal generator to initially test) so it's not a complete radio. A complete design would include the oscillator and a way to tune it. Also a stereo input sound card (e.g. USB sound interface) is needed if the PC doesn't have that already built-in.