When discussing benchmarks, main dev Mike Pall is willing if people pay him to port to PPC for Xbox360 and PS3 and what not. Haha. Who knows what we can do with this guy's creative juices!
Interesting. GNURadio is horrific to work with programmatically, and the UI is only passable. Unfortunately, the tricky part seems to be writing all the hardware-specific integration blocks and such, so cleaner programmatic interfaces in other languages aren't really useful. Hopefully we can get some competition in this area.
This is very cool. I have been programming since the mid 1960s (took an extension course at a local college when I was in high school) and except for a few work projects, I have not really touched hardware projects. I might give SDR a try.
Does anyone know how the quality of SDR compares to buying short wave, etc. Radios?
You can get RTL dongles to cover VHF and higher for $20, and probably $40 for a HF up-converter. 8 bits at 2Msps. Quality is not great, but it's cheap. Next up is probably an Airspy for $200 or less, which is I believe 12 bits at 10 Msps. Next up is 14 bits at 60 Msps for $300 - $600, such as Ettus B200. Finally 200 Msps for a few $k.
Though if you want to receive HF, best quality is from direct sampling hardware, so close to $1k.