Software Defined Hardware Radio

My second radio was much more ambitious. Probably too ambitious for a beginning amateur radio enthusiast. I had originally intended this to be a software defined radio (SDR) based on a Cypress CY8C29466 Programmable System on Chip (PSoC 1). I quickly discovered that the on-board M8C microcontroller had a number of shortcomings. First, it did not have anywhere near enough processing power, even with an on-board 8x8 hardware multiply-accumulate, to do even the simple SDR functions I had planned. Second, it generated quite a bit of noise while performing any significant amount of processing, which became manifest in the data generated through analog-to-digital conversions.

The radio (d)evolved over months of head pounding into a software defined hardware (SDH) radio. The PSoC would configure the analog blocks to form the baseband portion of a direct conversion (DC) receiver and provide the user interface control for setting the frequency and other anticipated (but never implemented) features. I had started working on a Weaver modulator, but I basically ran out of steam on the project and decided to move onto a real SDR setup.

Below is a photo of the radio in operation. It was tuned to Radio Havana Cuba (RHC) at the time. I added comments to the photo to point out the major elements of the radio.