A New Look at the Winradio G31DDC

I bought the G31DDC when it was brand new, thinking that this would be an excellent competitor to the Perseus SDR. Actually, it was an excellent receiver, installation goes in a breeze and it uses 12VDC external power, which is a lot easier to find in no-noise versions than 5VDC PSUs. Sensitivity is around -105 dBm, a tad better than the Perseus. But there were "issues"...

First, the Winradio GUI. It is, at least in my opinion, by no means optimised for efficient MW DX. And at the time there were no software alternatives. Second, and by far more important, the IQ files it recorded were not date- and timestamped! Absolutely disastrous, if you record a lot. And to top it all, no scheduler was available. What on earth were they thinking? Later, the G33DDC came along, with the recording issues solved, but still the old inefficient interface. And with the price doubled.

So, after a short while, my Winradio adventure ended.

I did notice later on that dynamic link libraries (dlls) were developed for use with HDSDR, but at that time I had parted with my G31 and G33.

Recently, related to a project I'm working on, I decided to take a new look at the G31DDC. So, I borrowed a unit (thanks TJ!) downloaded the HDSDR dll and tested the unit. Lo and behold, it is a good receiver!  The only downside is that the current dll only supports 1000 kHz sampling (800 kHz alias-free). So, the requirements for a good MW performer are still not met. But I believe that the dll could be revised to allow 1600 kHz alias-free sampling.

Because, with HDSDR, time- and datestamped files and scheduling is no problem at all.