I haven't jumped on the SDR bandwagon yet, and most of my reasons are the
same as mentioned by Russ. Unless you are exceptionally affluent, it's
hard
to justify spending that kind of money on a hobby activity. Aside from
that,
there is the apprehension that having an SDR could become a huge time
waster.
Like Russ, I make extensive use of timed recording. Virtually every day,
I
record the periods around TOH from just before sunset until at least an
hour
after sunrise. When reviewing the recordings, I listen from a minute
before
each TOH until just after TOH, and if it sounds promising, I do further
listening, especially in the period where stations typically come out of a
news break. Just to do a reasonably thorough job of reviewing one day's
worth of recordings takes a considerable amount of time, and that's for a
single tuned frequency. If I had an SDR recording that covers 100+
channels,
I can imagine the temptation to check one more, and another after that,
and
maybe just one more... before you know it, you've run out of hours in the
day, and neglected other important things that you should be doing. In
short, too much of a good thing. Sure, you just need to exercise some
self-
discipline to avoid slipping into this trap, and we all know how easy that
is. :-) I think SDR's are perfect for expeditions to special listening
locations where you want to make the most of the limited time available,
but
for routine monitoring, having that full band recording capability is a
bit
scary!
Lastly, with 2300+ stations logged from this location, I've heard all the
easy ones, and many of the not-so-easy ones. These days, I'm usually
going
after a specific target, which involves careful phasing to null out a pest
on
a given channel. This applies to timed recording as well as live
listening.
Since this setup applies to a specific channel, having the capability to
record many channels at once wouldn't really be much of an asset.
Having said all that, I can still think of a few instances where having an
SDR would be nice. The main one would be when there is some very unusual
propagation happening, which can bring in some new stations without the
use
of phasing. This is especially true of auroral events, which have been
exceedingly rare in recent years, but likely will become somewhat more
frequent as we head towards the next sunspot peak. The next time one
happens, I'll probably be kicking myself for not having an SDR to make the
most of the event. The SDR would also be useful for GY hunting, to grab
all
6 GY channels at once... but again, there's that time element involved in
checking the recordings.
Anyway, that's how I see it. In the long run, though, I'm sure that
resistance is futile!
Barry
--
Barry McLarnon VE3JF Ottawa, ON
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