[Lf] [Fwd: LF: Sound Cards]

[Andre Kesteloot]

DL4YHF at aol.com wrote:

> Hi Sandy,
>
> from own experiments with several soundcards I found only marginal
> differences as long as simple waterfall display is concerned - so I
> confirm Alberto's comments.
>    (Instead of a bit more dynamic range, I would love to have
>     a soundcard with two DC-coupled inputs,
>     for I/Q processing as last stage of a digital receiver
>     with simple but good analog frontend).
>
> A problem with audio cards on the mainboard is that they often catch
> noise from the digital components on the board. This can be very
> annoying, because sometimes the noise appears like "interesting
> looking" noise on the waterfall (water on the mills of the
> anti-soundcard fraction again ;-).
> On the other hand, if the soundcard "noise" is mostly random type, it
> is effectively reduced by the narrow-band gain of the FFT. So, for
> high frequency resolution, the usable dynamic range for a waterfall
> display often exceeds 120 dB (more than the dynamic range of a 16 bit
> ADC !).
>
> ----
> Related topic: I bought some a low-cost PIC with 10-bit ADC
> (PIC16F870) recently, planning to connect it to the serial interface
> as replacement for my laptop's audio device (which only has a lousy
> *mono* MIC input). Has anyone on the group ever tried to use this PIC
> for weak-signal work and check the ADC's performance, compared to a
> soundcard ?
>
>
>
> Regards,
> Wolf  DL4YHF
>



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