[hpsdr] In the Spirit of experimenters

[Jeremy McDermond]

When I was looking at Mercury, I wanted to see the price difference between building and buying an A&T board.  When I calculated out the cost difference, I saved a whole $20.  I don't think the TAPR boards are necessarily expensive.  Consider that the LTC2208 chip alone goes for $130 from DigiKey, and the FPGA is $42.  that's $170 in just two chips.  Considering that the A&T board from TAPR is only $329, and that the board itself is $29 of that, the two chips mentioned are over half the cost of the entire board.

When you consider that a K3/10 is going for $1449 from Elecraft, and that's essentially the equivalent of the board-level integration on the OpenHPSDR project, the costs don't look so bad.

  Magister:     $147
  Mercury:      $329
  Atlas:        $ 35
  LPU:          $ 39
  Pennywhistle: $ 69
  Pandora:      $ 99
  Penelope:     $425  (This is a guess based on what I've seen from Gerd)
  ------------------
               $1143

This doesn't include Alex which would get you the "full meal deal" with around 20W output from Penelope.  This is going to push the price up a tad above the K3/10 kit, but still well within the ballpark.  Granted, you have to hook OpenHPSDR up to a computer, but all the software is free of charge, and you likely already have a computer that can run one of the software packages.  Also, I understand and sympathize with our overseas friends that VAT and transportation costs can add some to this.

I didn't pick the K3/10 to say that OpenHPSDR is a better or worse transceiver.  I chose it because it's a transceiver with a renowned receiver that you could assemble from boards, and that had a similar power output to a barefoot Pennywhistle setup.

--
Jeremy McDermond (NH6Z)
Xenotropic Systems
mcdermj at xenotropic.com




 1279007335.0