[time-nuts] Re: SDR radios - Loran-C & WWV

[Scott Newell]

At 09:57 PM 3/6/2024, John Ackermann N8UR via time-nuts wrote:

>WWV tracking (and CHU as well) is a major experiment in the HamSci 
>(https://hamsci.org) community, where they've built low-cost 
>hardware to monitor multiple WWV frequencies 
>simultaneously.  There's a major effort lined up to get data from 
>hundreds of stations during the eclipse on April 8.

Do you happen to know if it's too late to get in on this? And if 
totality is required? (My QTH will only be 99.997%, but work will be 
in totality for 3:44. Steel building and no easy window access for an 
antenna, though.)


>There's an ~$250 device called the RX888 that's available on eBay 
>and Amazon that does this (no link because there are multiple 
>providers and I can't vouch for any of them).  And Phil Karn has 
>developed a completely new client/server based radio that uses 
>multicast to allow many clients receiving hundreds of channels to 
>connect to one receiver server.  Check out ka9q-radio at 
>https://github.com/ka9q/ka9q-radio

(Sorry to pile on with the questions...) This looks very exciting, 
but I'm concerned I might not have any PCs fast enough. Everything 
I've read just mentioned recent i5/i7, which is suitably vague. Any 
idea if there are benchmarks for guidance as to should work/might 
work/won't work?

Looking through the e-waste piles, I see the following:

CPU                           Geekbench 4    5           6 
(single/multicore score)
i7-4790 CPU @ 3.60GHz         4802/16033     1073/3967   1377/4374
i5-6500 CPU @ 3.20GHz         4238/12841     910/3187
Xeon E5-1620 v2 @ 3.70GHz     4079/14979     901/3750    765/2822
Xeon E3-1240 V2 @ 3.40GHz     4257/14133     913/3550    773/2707
Xeon X5650  @ 2.67GHz         2618/12433     541/3243    524/2317
i7-2920XM CPU @ 2.50GHz       3734/11556     792/2926    670/2207
i7-5500U CPU @ 2.40GHz        3929/7399      837/1781    1096/2123
i5-4200U CPU @ 1.60GHz        3368/5944      701/1423    914/1781
i3-5005U CPU @ 2.00GHz        2687/5176      538/1222    709/1495
Atom x6425E @ 2.00GHz         2753/6585      687/1673    548/1272
Atom E3950 @ 1.60GHz          1426/4401      311/1129    264/835

How to know if any would be suitable?

Thanks!


-- 
newell  N5TNL