Foundations Of Amateur Radio

Foundations of Amateur Radio During the week I finally made the decision to purchase my first software defined transmit capable radio. It wasn't an easy choice for me, given that the range of options vary in price from "not much" to "more than my car is worth" and an infinite number of choices between those. One of the considerations, other than price, was a thing called bit-depth. In the past I've spoken about how an analogue to digital converter or ADC uses bits to represent a radio signal. In short, a voltage coming from an antenna is represented as a digital value inside the radio. No signal represents a value of zero and maximum signal represents the maximum value that fits into the decoder. A concrete example might be an 8-bit ADC which can represent 256 different values. If you look at the choices available to you, you'll see that there are 8-bit radios, 12-bit ones, 16-bit, 18-bit and 24-bit radios. On the face of it you could just say, more bits is better, but how much better? For example, an ANA