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Palomar Amateur Radio Club STEM Experimentation Lab


📡 AirSpy HF+ Discovery Information

The STEMLab's HF Bench includes two AirSpy HF+ Discovery software defined radios.
These are excellent receivers that can tune over the entire HF band and part of the VHF bands. Being very small (45 x 60 x 10 mm) and light they are highly portable and can be used almost anywhere with a laptop or a Raspberry Pi.

The maximum sampling bandwidth is just 912kS/s which is less than most others we talk about. Even so they can reasonably cover any of the amateur HF bands at a time. OpenWebRX+ is set up with multiple profiles so you can select the individual HF band you want to tune to.

The available bandwidths that Airspy publishes are: 16, 24, 32, 48, 64, 96, 128, 192, 256, 384 and 768 KHz. They recently added 912 KHz in a recent update.

  • Interface: USB 2.0 (Micro-USB)
  • Lowest HF frequency: 0.5 MHz
  • Highest HF frequency: 31 MHz
  • VHF frequency range: 60 MHz - 260 MHz
  • Max receive bandwidth: 912 KHz
  • Price: in the $180 range
  • Size: 45 x 60 x 10 mm

Airspy HF+ Discovery

There are certain sampling bandwidths that work well for us in OpenWebRX+. Trying to use other bandwidth values produced suboptimal results or just plain didn't work at all. In general values in kS/s that are powers of two would work. The setup we ended up using is shown in the table below.
  • 192 KHz for 12, 30 and 40 meters
  • 256 KHz for 17 meters
  • 384 KHz for 20 meters
  • 456 KHz for 15 meters
  • 768 KHz for 10 and 80 meters

The configurations for OpenWebRX+ are here

References:

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Information is provided for education and instructional purposes only.