Elvaston

Was great fun - official webpage here. But it was not as good as previous years. I last visited three years ago, and there where at least two more large tents. Everything seemed scaled down - even the Icom tent, which last time bristled with cool equipment was now a shared tent with Kenwood - each having perhaps only two tables of their gear.

The most interesting thing there has to be the WiNRADiO which is a receiver that does its signal processing on the computer. The basic premisis being that it provides a much better control of the listening range then any of the hardware solutions currently out.

This product, and several others on display all seemed to point at a trend of moving back to having dual sets - one to listen and one to transmit, which of course leads to dangers of having them set on different frequencies, it does mean that you can have specialist gear for each one.

The WiNRADiO was seductive though - its got a really nice USB interface to a nice plastic shielded case. It's specs look great, and its has 'alternative' interfaces for selecting listening frequencies. One of these (as well as the tradional dial) was a graph of the entire frequency range, with a selection of the frequencies that are being amplified. The user can spot what frequencies are in use by seeing where the spikes are, and then just drags their selection over the top.

Seductive yes. Expensive yes - remember, this is only the receiver. With prices at £400 (£450 GBP for the better demodulator) you need to have a (Windows) PC allready (which lets face it, I do). But then if you want to transceive you also need to have another peice of gear to transmit from...

However if you wanted to do something like.. ooh I dont know, Amature Radio Astronomy, it might provide an exellent base to start from.