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Comment by anthomtb | Hacker News Reader

Am I missing something or is that ADALM-PLUTO a really good deal? Its going for $195 direct from AD. Half the frequency range of a USRP but 15% of the price.

I was going to hold off on my SDR hobby until a few more gray hairs and $$$ came into my life but might need to pull the trigger on that guy (yes I know you can get an rtl-sdr for like $30).

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It's only got 7 dBm / 5 mW worth of TX power. You'll still need a dedicated power amplifier or multiple - not sure, antenna/PA isn't my specialty - if you wish to communicate with anything more than a few feet away from you.

Also, its frequency range officially begins at 325 MHz. That's usable enough for the 70cm ham radio range, but practically useless for anything on the longer bands without a hack [1] that will only give you the 2m and 4m bands.

On the other hand... you don't want to go below the 2m range on a handheld anyway, antenna length can be a real pain.

ETA: WiMo sells a transverter but it'll cost you about the same amount of money that you'd have to shell out for the Pluto... and still only 50 mW of TX power. Given that our club station has a PA stage that can blast out the full allowed 750W on 160m, that's quite a difference...

[1] https://www.rtl-sdr.com/adalm-pluto-sdr-hack-tune-70-mhz-to-...

[2] https://www.wimo.com/de/dxpatrol-charon-hf-transverter-for-a...

You can also "hack" Plutos pretty easily to essentially be a USRP. The 9363 is just a derated 9361 which can go down to 70mhz, so they'll usually work if you swap the FPGA software load.

Yeah but as said going down to 70 MHz alone won't give you that many popular ham bands (at least not the ones allowed in Germany).

An SDR that can transmit down to the 160m band (1800 kHz) however... that would be practically the end of ICOM, Yaesu, Kenwood and other high-price brands.

Honestly, there are a bunch out there at similar price points to the big names, but I think the critical mass of the ham community is too geriatric to understand what IQ means and just wants to ragchew on 20m. Based on what I've seen the younger crowd is all up in the V/UHF space playing with digital radios but that's where SDR has seen the least penetration because you need something spicier than a repurposed AF ADC for the available bandwidths. I've literally seen people on reddit pleading for the ability to dump the entire 2m band at once from an HT and practically, that's pretty trivial, there's just no hardware. I'm starting to wonder if the big radio manufacturers are trying to market segment the AD9xxx/ADRV9xxx chips away from the consumers and towards to military customers. They're more expensive but you can get 9363s and 7010s for $20 ea, so total list price around maybe $500.

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