{"id":7040,"date":"2019-05-04T11:31:00","date_gmt":"2019-05-04T01:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/2019\/05\/04\/sdr-vs-hdr-is-the-superhet-dead\/"},"modified":"2025-07-21T22:08:21","modified_gmt":"2025-07-21T12:08:21","slug":"sdr-vs-hdr-is-the-superhet-dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/2019\/05\/04\/sdr-vs-hdr-is-the-superhet-dead\/","title":{"rendered":"SDR vs. HDR &#8211;  Is the Superhet Dead?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen=\"\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"247\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/5-hGJbGNZRs\" width=\"440\"><\/iframe><br \/> <b>Pete N6QW had this very interesting video about Software Defined Radio <a href=\"http:\/\/n6qw.blogspot.com\/2019\/05\/sdr-and-why-you-should-make-move-to-new.html\">on his blog<\/a>. Thanks to G3WGV for putting this presentation together. <\/b><br \/> <b><br \/><\/b> <b>It is very interesting, but &#8212; for me &#8212; it is also troubling. I think something important is being missed in this discussion. You have to listen carefully, but if you do the thing being missed becomes apparent. <\/b><br \/> <b><br \/><\/b> <b>Like many others, G3WGV asserts that very soon, 100 percent of commercial radios will be SDR. Traditional superhet radios will be a thing of the past. <\/b><br \/> <b><br \/><\/b> <b>OK, but I will make a parallel assertion: Looking ahead, I think 100 percent of TRULY homebrewed rigs will be HDR. <\/b><br \/> <b><br \/><\/b> <b>Of course, this really just comes down to how you define &#8220;homebrew.&#8221; I&#8217;m a traditionalist here. I think of homebrewing as actually building &#8212; from discrete components &#8212; all the stages that send or receive radio signals. By my definition, I don&#8217;t think you can really &#8220;homebrew&#8221; an SDR radio. Taking an ADC chip and connecting it to a computer running SDR software is not &#8212; by my definition &#8212; homebrew. Even if you wrote the software yourself, writing code is not the same as wiring up all the stages that go into a superhet-style transceiver. <\/b><br \/> <b><br \/><\/b> <b>There were a few lines in G3WGV&#8217;s talk that seemed to confirm this difference: The SDR radio is defined as a &#8220;server.&#8221; Commercial manufacturers like SDR because they can use the same components that go into cell phones (exactly &#8212; and people will soon have the same relationship with these &#8220;radios&#8221; that we have with their cell phones). <\/b><br \/> <b><br \/><\/b> <b>I kind of grimaced when G3WGV described the two sets of users of SDR technology: the &#8220;early adopters&#8221; who are &#8220;technology enthusiasts&#8221;, and the &#8220;pragmatists&#8221; who don&#8217;t care what&#8217;s in the box &#8212; they just want to talk on it. I think &#8220;pragmatist&#8221; is a nice way of saying &#8220;appliance operator.&#8221; Even the &#8220;early adopters&#8221; are pretty far from the world of traditional homebrew. And for me that gets to the point that is being missed in all this &#8212; this shift away from hardware is also a shift away from homebrew. <\/b><br \/> <b><br \/><\/b> <b>But hey, this is a hobby. To each is own! Have it your way. For myself, I plan to continue with the hardcore, radical fundamentalist, hardware-defined, discrete component, fully analog homebrew radio. This morning I am attempting to stabilize a cap and coil VFO. And I&#8217;m liking it. As the world shifts to SDR, I look forward to the appearance on e-Bay of massive quantities of old forsaken HDR rigs. We will buy them for pennies on the dollar and use the parts for new HDR Superhet rigs. <\/b><br \/> <b><br \/><\/b> <b>Viva E. Howard Armstrong! Viva! <\/b><br \/> <b><br \/><\/b> <\/p>\n<div class=\"separator\" style=\"clear: both; text-align: center;\"> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/armstrongmeme2.jpg\" imageanchor=\"1\" style=\"margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" border=\"0\" data-original-height=\"500\" data-original-width=\"500\" height=\"398\" src=\"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/armstrongmeme2.jpg\" width=\"400\" \/><\/a><\/div>\n<p> <b><br \/><\/b> <b><br \/><\/b> <b><br \/><\/b> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Pete N6QW had this very interesting video about Software Defined Radio on his blog. Thanks to G3WGV for putting this presentation together. It is very interesting, but &#8212; for me &#8212; it is also troubling. I think something important is being missed in this discussion. You have to listen carefully, but if you do the &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/2019\/05\/04\/sdr-vs-hdr-is-the-superhet-dead\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;SDR vs. HDR &#8211;  Is the Superhet Dead?&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3067,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[224,40,57,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-armstrong-e-howard","category-sdr","category-superhet-receivers","category-uk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7040"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7040\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7041,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7040\/revisions\/7041"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3067"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}