[hpsdr] hello, and can hpsdr go above HF?

[Erik Anderson]

Hello, I consider myself a relatively newly-licensed amateur radio person
that has had no experience yet (so far) outside of a triband HT.  I google a
lot, which means that I have a lot of shiny information and questions that
may not make sense in the dirt of Real Life.  I have interest in a radio
that can "do almost anything", so that I can explore stuff like SSB / PKCS13
/ WinLink / Packet / DV (AMBE atlas module! lol) / DVB-S without having to
get a different radio for each one.  I like HPSDR because of its modularity,
hackability, and advertised ability to amplify above 5W (most SDRs seem to
be stuck at 0.5W and the local ham radio club's general feeling seems to be
that such low power is unlikely to be amplified to a high enough level for
serious non-QRP)

I have no experience with HF yet, and while I'm being heavily encouraged to
dive into this, I also would like to explore the upper bands as well.  I
understand that HPSDR has no I/F stage, so simply increasing the upper
frequency ceiling would likely involve trying to brute-force boost the speed
and bandwidth of all bottlenecks until something starts smoking, so I'm
thinking that any movement to a higher "band" needs to have a separate
approach.

(*) The website I believe stated that intentionally making use of aliasing
may be useful in receiving out-of-band signals (and that seems to drive a
lot of the lowpass filter discussion on this list).  However, considering
that one person was reporting ghost frequencies with 4 samples/cycle, having
so few samples that the system can't even figure out the frequency doesn't
sound like a method of extracting a high quality signal.

(*) N4HY once linked to a few upconverters / downconverters that might be
linkable to the HPSR

(*) What would happen if someone tried to stick a het onto the HPSDR antenna
connection, perhaps some multiple of the Image frequency in order to take
advantage of the anti-alias scrubbing likely already in the system?

Lastly, I'd like to pin the usual disclaimer here stating that no offense is
intended.  I seem to put my foot in my mouth an awful lot in these amateur
radio circles and often I find I can "send faster than I can copy".
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