Shortly after the SDR-1000 came out I discovered the Flex Radio Website and became very interested in Software Defined Radios.
At the time I had just made the purchase of a FT-897 and could not justify the purchase of another radio. I followed the development of the SDR-1000 and researched the Web for anything related to SDRs.
At the end of 2005, the American QRP Club introduced a kit: the SoftRock-40, a tiny 40 m Software Defined Receiver, Xtal controlled and, depending on the sound card of the PC, allowing reception of a 48 KHz, 96 KHz or 192 KHz portion of the 40m band centered on the Xtal frequency divided by 4. I was lucky to get one of these kits and became hooked on SDRs.
AMQRP produced only one run of the kit – 800 pieces – and
they sold like hot cakes. A Yahoo group - softrock40 - was
created and Tony Parks,
KB9YIG, introduced various follow up kits: the SoftRock
V5, V6, V7, V6 Lite and recently a beta version of a SoftRock Transceiver.
My
SoftRock-40, the enclosure is from a VHF Radio – Driver and PA section – of unknown
origin.
My SofRock Transceiver (work in progress).
Top view
Front View
… More to
come …