Sunday, July 11, 2010

Excalibur Has Arrived

Got it on Wednesday evening, July 7th. I ordered it with Waters & Stanton on June 20nd, and received confirmation on same-day despatch. However they didn't send it until I made an inquiry nine days later. The question why it took so long remained unanswered. Anyway, I was lucky enough to be able to buy from the first batch of receivers sent to Europe. Thanks Tracey Gardner for alerting me.

The Excalibur came with a 12VDC linear power supply, a proprietary USB cable and an SMA-to-BNC adapter, rather fragile in appearance in fact. Surely, nobody uses SMA connectors for their HF receivers??? A comprehensive (107 pages in fact) user's guide, based on the Excalibur software help function was also enclosed.

The hardware is more or less identical to the other Winradio receivers. The footprint roughly equals that of the Perseus SDR, but slightly taller.

As I learn more about the receiver I will post some theme-based impressions on the blog. More as it happens.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Im Curious how the sensitivity is on the MW band ?

Bjarne Mjelde said...

We will know that when I have measured it. Winradio states -102 dBm and that is probably correct.

low vhf tv dx qrp 28 mhz said...

i look forward to your test results and what it can do that the perseus cant if anything on mw dx that is. as it stands it would take alot for me to rush out and get the excalibur as at the moment for mw dx wideband recordings nothing can touch the perseus and i am not saying the perseus is the best receiver out there far from it but the selling point for me anyway is the full mw recording and to handle itself well on mw.