|
You can
write your own review of the Eladit FDM-77.
|
W2TCB
|
Rating: 5/5
|
Jul 11, 2006 15:17
|
Send this review to a friend
|
|
Solid receiver with a quiet front end
|
Time owned: 0 to 3 months
|
My results were completely opposite from the first reviewer. I found the receiver to be very sensitive with great dynamic range and a very low noise floor, much lower than my Yaesu or Kenwood amateur radios. The advantages of the Elad were apparent on a 40-meter dipole, swl sloper or 6-meter ringo. It consistently pulled in signals that the other radios would not hear and with lower background noise. The filtering is excellent and I could really appreciate some of the 40-meter HF operators (around 7.20mhz) and their HiFi sound.
The software is upgradeable and version 4.0 is very stable. The unit runs USB, which is nice (so many high end radios still require serial ports which no new computer, in the last 2 years, have shipped with).
WinRadio is finally shipping USB based boxes (as opposed to the internal cards – again outdated) so in the future I may be able to compare but I don’t have a great desire to do so. I guess I am satisfied.
|
|
M1JDK
|
Rating: 2/5
|
Mar 16, 2006 14:39
|
Send this review to a friend
|
|
Want to hear your PC?
|
Time owned: 0 to 3 months
|
Despite the reasonable review in a UK radio mag, I found this receiver to be poor in several ways:
1. The software was buggy and would often crash, recovery from which had to be via a reboot.
2. This is a noisy receiver. Even with the antenna input terminated, there are lots of spurious signals over the whole HF spectrum. Not just carriers either, but modulated, S9+ signals that change depending on what the PC is currently doing.
3. The interface details (USB) are proprietary. Why Elad refuse to Open Source the command set and drivers is beyond me. I'm sure they'd sell more to the ham community if they did this - and we'd end up with a better product, with support for other operating systems.
In its defence, due to being a SDR, it did have a good range of IF bandwidths, and the analysis tools were reasonable.
In summary, although this is a Software Defined Radio, I think Elad have jumped on the SDR bandwagon and have produced an uninspiring radio with a (no wider than normal technology) 12KHz wide IF. They've then added some PC based DSP and called it a SDR, and that final step ruined the already poor noise performance.
Sorry Elad - you can keep it. I've heard the external WinRadio is a bit better...
|
|
If you have any questions, problems, or suggestions about Reviews,
please email your Reviews Manager.
|
|
|
|
|
