TAPR High Performance Software Defined Radio

[fgentges at mindspring.com]

The TAPR group has been working on a high performance SDR.  Now they 
have asked for a show of hands of people that would be interested in 
buying their Mercury receiver module.  You would need to pay by 15 
November and receive the board around mid-January 2009.

This receiver shows real promise as the front end has a 16 bit A/D and a 
sample rate to support up to 65 MHz.  That is over twice the high 
frequency limit of the SDR-IQ and two more bits of A/D resolution.  By 
upping the resolution the dynamic range is improved.  This could be an 
important advance.

To run this board, two other boards are needed, a backplane named ATLAS 
and the USB to computer interface named OZY.

So, to end up with a working receiver you will need the following:

TAPR Membership, $20
ATLAS, Kit, $25
OZY, $137
MERCURY, $329

Total, $511

The ATLAS board is only available as a kit and is quite reasonable to 
assemble yourself.  It is mainly a backplane board and the individual 
board connectors.

The OZY and MERCURY boards can be bought bare but for our purposes here 
we are listing the assembled and tested option.

There are some other boards to fill out the backplane into a full 
transceiver and you can see and learn more at

www.tapr.org at

http://hpsdr.org/ and ordering details at

http://www.tapr.org/kits_merc.html

And yes, by paying extra, you can buy the boards without joining TAPR.

Note that this is just the hardware.  Some software is available but a 
lot of work is expected on improved and expanded versions.  I am not 
sure a Mercury package is ready yet.

Terry, WB4JFI has some of these and can provide some hands-on experiences.

Frank K0BRA