With the abundance of cheap RTL-SDRs and the ever-decreasing prices of more capable SDRs, there may seem to be little room left for low-bandwidth devices that we were happy with a decade or more ago, but there is still a lot to learn from something so simple. Still something [Luigi Cruz] shows us with a simple SDR using the analog-digital capabilities of the Raspberry Pi Picoand since it works with GNU Radio, we think it’s a pretty sophisticated project. CNX Software has the full storyand quickly revealed that with its 500,000 samples per second bandwidth, it was not a machine to ignite the world of SDR, even when pushing Nyquist’s law to the limit.
So, except for the time signals and a few Long Wave broadcast stations, if you live somewhere where they still exist, you’ll need a flyer and a converter to turn on something very useful on the radio with this SDR. But a baseband SDR with a few hundred kHz useful bandwidth and easy to hack via GNU Radio for the insignificant price of the Raspberry Pi Pico should be worth a second look. You can see it in action in the video below the break, and if you’re having trouble what to do with it, take a look Michael Osman and Kate Temkin talk about Superconference 2019.