Brookstone multiclock manual5/26/2023 The Belka DSP, on the other, hand is not exactly a conventional radio to begin with but a basic (“direct conversion”) SDR. If they do use the DSP features, that’s how some end up as “triple conversion” receivers – 2 conventional IF stages with a 3rd, DSP IF stage – and some common quirks. For starters, said Chinese radios, albeit digitally controlled, are actually still “conventional” analog radios which employ digital signal processing only at some varying later stage in the circuit and use only parts of the many features provided by the SiLabs chip (of which DSP is only a part), some even still rely on analog ceramic IF filters and use the chip only to provide AM/FM (e.g. Some presumed it’s based on an RTL chip… but that’s all as far from the truth as it gets. It seems that some people read “DSP”, see the price and automatically dismiss it as yet another SiLabs 473x radio like many of the bargain Chinese shortwave portables, and the Belka’s miniscule size may suggest that it might not be the best of them either. These innards deserve some examination, because there seems to be some confusion about the nature of this radio out there on the interwebz: Much bigger inside – technicalities: The Belka DSP is very different from those, while it could possibly be smuggled into the country in a shoe heel, it boasts an endurance of 18h and it consists of 100,000s of transistors due to its highly integrated and low-power consuming electronics. pen radio but it would sure beat classic spy radio equipment which could be anything from a suitcase full of electronics to small boxes with comparatively few transistors in it, and they all wouldn’t have lasted much longer than it takes to be killed by 007 before the batteries would run out of juice. It’s not quite 007’s clothes brush communicator or the U.N.C.L.E. The form factor could be described as “bigger than a box of matches but smaller than a pack of cigarettes” to the ex- and still-smokers, and the elderly people among us who watched all the classic spy flicks out there may inevitably associate it with “spy radio”. This is no doubt a solid little piece of gear though, one that doesn’t try to be anything but functional. The outside: Spy radio reloadedĪdmittedly, the tiny metal box with 4 buttons and a (metal) knob, antenna, headphone and a micro USB jack on the side, bringing less than 100 grams onto the scale, in a size that could make this radio as hard to find as your car keys may look like something that must have traded functionality for size. Then, when this fine blog spread the news about the Mobimax.bg shop in Bulgaria offering this radio, I started another research and I learned that I’m not the only one who had some serious misconceptions about the little squirrel. There wasn’t a lot of information when I took notice of its existence last year, having to order it from a Cyrillic script website prevented an impulse purchase and to be honest, I didn’t think that a shortwave receiver so small could do anything as good or even better than the radios I already own. However, the Belka DSP is so very, very tiny and disguised in understatement that it squirreled itself out of my sight for a while. Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, 13DKA, who shares the following guest post:
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