Digital Radio Mondiale DRM
Elektor DRM Tuner
"Elektor", a German electronics magacine, had in spring 2004 the idea and layout for a double-superhet DRM Tuner, to be connected to a PC running a DRM decoder software. By the small price for the tuner kit I was interested to test it and ordered 2 kits (one for my dad, absolutely similar project). The kit was an easy job, just soldering the SMD-type DDS-oscillator was a bit tricky (for the unexperienced ;-).
All right, the Elektor tuner is a double-superhet with 455 hc and 12 kc IF. A very compact board, with on-board serial interface (COM). Costs are about Euro 80. Supply voltage for the board is 9 VDC; I was lucky to get a wall-mount supply from a surplus for Euro 1.95. I have used a alu enclosure for the board, with TNC-jack for antenna input and 3.5 mm jack for audio out. So the complete tuner with on-/off-switch and power LED looks more serious.
The board and parts kit is available from Geist Electronic
| top side of the board |
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| the lower side with the
SMD-type DDS |
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For the tuner kit a control software is available, but one can also use the DRM Discoverer software from Karsten Knuetter, which has a nice feature: it shows all active DRM transmissions. The software can be found on Karsten's webpage DRM Discoverer
To decode the DRM-signal there are 2 possible solutions: 1st the freeware (GNU) DREAM decoder DREAM , which can be also found on the web as an executable file for Windows, and 2nd the DRM Software Radio DRMRX which is per online-shopping for Euro 60 available. I tested DREAM, version 1.1.1, and then bought the DRM Software Radio. From the quality of decoding I can not find a real difference, but with respect to CPU- and memory-usage the DRM Software Radio is more efficient. The actual release of DRM Software radio is 2.0.38.
The last CVS of DREAM I have tested is 1.3.1.
