2015-06-07

FDM-SW2 and WinBook TW100 - first impressions

I bought recently FDM-DUO, a QRP transceiver made by a small Italian company, Elad. The radio is really nice. The receiver is a bandpass sampling (no downconversion on RF side, sometimes called direct sampling), full SDR design, with all signal processing and demodulation done in FPGA and software on microcontrollers. The transmitter side uses more traditional approach, where the modulation occurs in digital domain at 0Hz IF, and after conversion to analog domain is upconverted to the band of interest.
It's not my first software radio platform (I've already enjoyed for about couple of years experimenting with bladeRF), but FDM-DUO has the big advantage of integrating the digital and analog circuitry with sleek, minimalistic, knobbed user interface in a small, handy package. The radio can be used as an SDR interface to an application running on a computer, but can also be used as a traditional, standalone HF transceiver.