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The WinRadio WR-G31DDC “Excalibur” Software Defined Radio I confess, I’m one of those shortwave radio listeners who has always believed the best tabletop radio is one that looks like a radio–a radio with knobs, buttons, a digital or analog display, and one sole purpose in life: to tune in the stations I want to hear. When software defined radios (SDRs) came to the market many years ago, I honestly thought I’d never use one, certainly never as my main receiver–after all, who wants to turn on a computer just to listen to the radio?

I’ve discovered that I do! The WinRadio WR-G31DDC “Excalibur” Over the past year, since I’ve become more and more engaged in, I realized I needed to get a tool for making this a simpler, even more automated process. Clearly, I needed to find an SDR for the job. So, last year, I started the process of evaluating SDRs to find the one that would best suit my needs as a discriminating shortwave radio listener, ham radio operator, and amateur radio archivist. And since I wanted to be able to record spectrum, I needed a true SDR, not a PC-controlled IF receiver.

The Excalibur packages includes the receiver, application software CD, low-noise power supply, USB cable, SMA to BNC connector, and, an excellent user’s manual. Several considerations steered me toward the WinRadio Excalibur over, say, the, the, or the –all models with which the Excalibur is often compared.

It was a tough decision, and I’ll go into greater detail about my selection criteria in a future post on. But the overarching factor that guided my final decision–? Simply put, it was the Excalibur’s robust recording functionality. I’m grateful to WinRadio for giving me a loaner Excalibur to evaluate over a two month period of time–at the end of which, I decided that I liked the radio so much, I purchased it from them for the same price they offered to their customers at the 2012 Dayton Hamvention.

The WinRadio Excalibur is manufactured in Australia First impressions–and installation When I first held the Excalibur receiver in my hands, I was a little surprised by its size–it’s a bit smaller than I expected. The radio itself is not much larger than a typical portable shortwave radio, thus, it’s quite easy to fit into a laptop case for mobile DXing. The unit itself has very few connections; just three, in fact: • an SMA type RF connector (WinRadio supplies an SMA to BNC adapter), for external antennas • a control cable port • a DC power supply port On the “front” of the radio, there’s only a blue LED light (which can be controlled by the Excalibur software), and a power button. The chassis is made of a durable transparent polymer, and inside, the receiver is protected by a metal enclosure.

SDR Software Defined Radio. O.k., at this point, this is my biggest obsession with amateur radio. Software defined radio (SDR) is the forefront of technology. IMO this is as big of an advancement as the move from using tubes to solid state transistors in radio equipment. The QS1R - Quicksilver Project This one is the one I'm directly.

Frankly, it’s a pretty sleek looking piece of gear, and its footprint is small enough not to take up much space on a desktop. In fact, it resembles an external hard drive more than it does a receiver. The Excalibur application software: a brief introduction Allow me to begin by saying, the WinRadio Excalibur application software is very easy to install. The install package is surprisingly small–a little less than 10MB–thus it installs very quickly. In fact, if you want to check out the application for yourself, it’s a free download from.

If you don’t have an Excalibur radio hooked up to your computer, the software will allow you to run in “Demo Mode,” in which you can explore settings, customization, etc. Good news: the WinRadio Excalibur is purely “plug-and-play.” You load the application, you plug the radio into your PC, and it works.

The virtual control panel The application software’s graphic user interface (GUI)–or as WinRadio calls it, the “virtual control panel”–has a very logical layout: In the upper left part of the window (see screenshot below) you’ll find the frequency display and tabs for each of the three individual virtual receivers you can use within the allotted spectrum bandwidth (see above). In the middle of this section, you’ll find a tuning knob and configurable analog-styled meter. In the right portion of the upper pane, you’ll find all the mode controls, along with memory, filters, audio mixing, notch, squelch, gain, and the noise blanker. The control panel, otherwise, is divided into three main spectrum windows: • The top right window displays the spectrum as seen by the currently selected virtual receiver. It’s within this window that you can tune, change the passband, visually adjust the notch filter, and even view the audio spectrum. It is, essentially, the IF spectrum–WinRadio calls this the “ Demodulator Spectrum.” • The top left window contains the DDC spectrum, the bandwidth of which can vary anywhere from 20 kHz to 2 MHz, selectable in 21 steps. All three virtual receivers can be used simultaneously within the DDC spectrum bandwidth; in other words, if the DDC is set to a 1 MHz bandwidth between 9,200-10,200 kHz, you could listen to and/or record broadcasters on 9,580 and 9,625 kHz and 9,990 kHz.