What is Radioberry in Amateur Radio?

| November 11, 2023 | Amateur Radio (Ham Radio), Computers | No Comments

What is Radioberry in Amateur Radio?

Radioberry is an HF transceiver board, currently in its version 2 and beta release 5. It is an AD9866 Hermslite SDR, also known as Raspberry Pi SDR Hat for frequencies ranging from 1- 30 MHz. The AD9866 chip which is a 12 bit microcontroller, gives it one RX and one TX channel with a maximum bandwidth of up to 384 kHz. According to PA3GSB, it is an experimental board in its perpetual beta stage. He has mentioned that he is providing all detailed information and is not selling the Radioberry. Yet he is sharing information and willing to help builders to make their own SDR. I could see one online site for purchasing the RadioBerry 2.0 Release 5.0 Beta board at $123.99 today. Raspberry Pi 4 has to be purchased separately and prepared. Compatibility with Raspberry Pi 5 has not been mentioned.

As it is open source, it is accessible to developers and hobbyists and its advanced features and capabilities make it suitable for use in many different applications. VU2XTO in our region has built a Radioberry transceiver, pictures of which can be seen on his qrz.com page. Radioberry Juice is one of the softwares available for Radioberry, which can be installed on Windows or Linux systems. It has a user friendly interface for controlling and configuring the Radioberry. Radioberry connects directly to Raspberry Pi main board and functions as a direct down and up conversion SDR transceiver. Power supply for the Radioberry board comes from the Raspberry Pi. There is a wiki on RadioBerry at github.com which provides all the information needed for the homebrewing radio amateur.

AD9866 is a 12 bit Broadband Modem Mixed Signal Front End from Analog Devices. In Radioberry, it has been repurposed as a direct down conversion and direct up conversion SDR which covers up to 30 MHz. There is an IN-OUTPUT for control filter boards or other extended hardware. Information for all the open source hardware, firmware and software are available at the GitHub link. As a disclaimer, though I have seen several online articles on Radioberry, I am yet to try it out.