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Reviews For: WinRadio G313i amd G313e

Category: Receivers: General Coverage

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Review Summary For : WinRadio G313i amd G313e
Reviews: 1MSRP: G313i 999.95, G313e, 1195.00
Description:
9khz to 30 mHz General Coverage SDR Receiver
Product is in production
More Info: http://www.winradio.com/
# last 180 days Avg. Rating last 180 days Total reviews Avg. overall rating
0015
WB5AGF Rating: 2008-08-13
Computer Driven DSP Receiver Covering From LF - SW Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
These are my first thoughts on the WinRadio G313e (and hence the G313i) Receiver as I have only had it for a few days.

(comments on WinRadio's product line)
Before you get too confused over WinRadio's product line (there are a lot of receivers) let me suggest that you go visit their Web Site and looks through the product descriptions. There are two main physical configurations - a receiver-on-a-card that gets mounted in the computer and an external 'box' that gets connected to your PC.

The G313i is the internally mounted (in the PC) receiver-on-a-card and the G313e is the stand-alone receiver-in-a-box (the outside case appears to be brushed aluminum in a clear plastic covering).

The G313x (the 'i' and the 'e') receivers provide the same performance according to WinRadio; they cover from well below the AM broadcast band up to 30 MHz. A major difference between them and the G303 receivers (which are about half the price) is that the G313 receivers do all the signal processing within themselves and do not depend on the PC's sound card (which the G303 series use for final signal processing).

The G313e (which I have) uses a USB connection to the PC for both control/status as well as the path used to send digitized audio to the PC where it is then sent to the sound card (the control software handles this invisibly to the user).

So far I have only used the supplied 'antenna' (about 20 feet of wire coming out of a thin coax) and it is far too close to the computer for proper evaluation of the receiver's performance. (The environment around a PC is full of noise and strange signals.) What I have observed is that the G313e seems extremely stable and was right on-frequency as it came out of the box (there is a way to generate new calibration data if desired by downloading a file from the WinRadio Web Site).

The G313 demodulation functions seem very well implemented and I have been impressed with the audio quality from some local AM stations (listening to them in : AM, synchronous AM, USB, LSB, DSB (to test this I need to figure a way to null the carrier and see if the demodulation continues to work) and ISB. When ISB (independent sideband) is selected then you can select either the upper or lower sidebands to listen to. So far I have not found if it is possible to feed the upper and lower sideband signals to the left and right audio channels although logically that should be possible.

I want to play with DRM (Digital Radio Mondiale) reception on the shortwave bands and so I bought a license for the DRM demodulator (software download from the WinRadio site) but have had a problem getting it to load on my computer (I get a strange error message) and am waiting on a reply from WinRadio's tech support people (since they are in Australia and I am in the U.S. it means that getting a two way e-mail exchange takes about a day)

Eventually I will get a decent antenna and be able to provide a thorough review but so far I am impressed.

73

Paul, WB5AGF
Garland, Texas