The Elektor SDR Hands-on Kit is intended for those who are interested in Software Defined Radio or SDR. This is a radio technique that relies on software to do most of the hard radio work. In a traditional radio electronic circuitry is used to modulate or demodulate a high-frequency carrier signal to add or extract the information from it. SDR does all this in software.

Elektor has already given much attention to SDR over the years. Not just the technology, but also in the form of practical and easy-to-build hardware. Already in 2007 there appeared an SDR receiver in the form of a shield for an Arduino Uno, where the Uno took care of the tuning of the oscillator on the SDR board. The audio-out signal from the circuit board was sent to a PC, which used special SDR software to distil the received audio signals. This way, signals from 150 kHz to 30 MHz could be received.

Get Going with the Elektor SDR Hands-on Kit

The Arduino-compatible SDR shield contained in the Elektor SDR Hands-on Kit is an SDR front-end that can receive and transmit radio signals up to 30 MHz. The SDR Hands-on Book shows you how to use it to receive for instance Morse signals, shortwave radio stations, single sideband stations and digital signals, but also how to build a QRP transceiver or how to use it in an electronics lab as a measurement tool.

The kit is presented in more detail in this video:
 

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