Honestly, there are a bunch out there at similar price points to the big names, but I think the critical mass of the ham community is too geriatric to understand what IQ means and just wants to ragchew on 20m. Based on what I've seen the younger crowd is all up in the V/UHF space playing with digital radios but that's where SDR has seen the least penetration because you need something spicier than a repurposed AF ADC for the available bandwidths. I've literally seen people on reddit pleading for the ability to dump the entire 2m band at once from an HT and practically, that's pretty trivial, there's just no hardware. I'm starting to wonder if the big radio manufacturers are trying to market segment the AD9xxx/ADRV9xxx chips away from the consumers and towards to military customers. They're more expensive but you can get 9363s and 7010s for $20 ea, so total list price around maybe $500.
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Honestly, there are a bunch out there at similar price points to the big names, but I think the critical mass of the ham community is too geriatric to understand what IQ means and just wants to ragchew on 20m. Based on what I've seen the younger crowd is all up in the V/UHF space playing with digital radios but that's where SDR has seen the least penetration because you need something spicier than a repurposed AF ADC for the available bandwidths. I've literally seen people on reddit pleading for the ability to dump the entire 2m band at once from an HT and practically, that's pretty trivial, there's just no hardware. I'm starting to wonder if the big radio manufacturers are trying to market segment the AD9xxx/ADRV9xxx chips away from the consumers and towards to military customers. They're more expensive but you can get 9363s and 7010s for $20 ea, so total list price around maybe $500.