Hackaday Europe 2026: High Performance SDR On The Cheap

Anders Nielsen built a high-performance software-defined radio (SDR) for under $50, presenting the project at Hackaday Europe 2026. The design uses a TLV3253 comparator for quadrature sampling, a Silicon Labs Si5351 as the local oscillator, and an ADA4891 op-amp as a buffer before the ADC. The build evolved from a soundcard ADC to an STM32 dual ADC and finally to an HT9201 dual 20 MHz 10-bit ADC, with USB 2.0 streaming via an FX2LP clone. The rig achieved up to 20 MHz bandwidth and successfully received the entire FM broadcast band simultaneously. Challenges included flat analog frequency response, clock jitter, and front-end bandwidth limits. Future plans include a wideband front-end mixer, low-noise amplifier, and improved filtering.

Source: https://hackaday.com/2026/07/27/hackaday-europe-2026-high-performance-sdr-on-the-cheap. 8sync News only summarizes and links out; content copyright belongs to the authors and original sources.