Softrock Progress

I'm making progress with the Softrock Ensemble RXTX build. I've gotten three more stages completed. The RF/IO switching, the QSD RX mixer, and the RX opamps and output.

Here is the latest bottom of the board pic:

Photo_2

And the top of the board:

Photo_1

The receive section is done! And it works! I was able to hook it up and fire it up. Here is a shot of the waterfall using the Rocky SDR app in Windows:

Pastedgraphic-1

Definitely hear lots of CW. The one problem I'm having right now is that (as you can see from the waterfall) I'm getting mirrored images, so the receiver's image rejection isn't working for some reason. The build manual has a section on dealing with it but I haven't gone through it yet. It could be a bad connection, or my limited knowledge of SDR software. I'll figure it out, but will postpone troubleshooting it until I've worked the rest of the stages to ensure that its not something that fixes itself once another stage is complete. But it's promising and it definitely works! Very cool.

Posted on Monday, Oct 10, 2011