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Introduction 1
Introduction
The AM Radcap PCIe card is a radio capture card designed for simultaneous
recording of up to 32 radio stations. The frequency of each individual
station may be set in software and its audio appears as a standard Windows
audio input device.
The AM Radcap uses a high speed analogue-to-digital converter to digitise
the entire AM band, with advanced digital signal processing on a Spartan 6
FPGA used to tune and extract the audio for each individual station. It can
be configured to either create a separate audio stream for each station or
to pair stations together as 2-channel streams.
A WDM driver for Windows XP, Windows 7/8 and other versions is supplied
as well software for setting the tuner frequencies and monitoring the
received audio.
A recording level control, mute control and peak meter are provided for
each station (or pair of stations) through the devices’ mixer ports. The
default level setting is 50%, and at this setting 100% modulation will
produce a peak audio level 6dB below clipping.
A utility called AmSpectrum is supplied. This displays the RF spectrum from
500kHz to 1700kHz and may be useful in selecting the best location for the
antenna or resolving interference problems. The receiver bandwidth can
be set to wide (default) or narrow. The narrow setting restricts the audio
response to about 3kHz, which may be useful in noisy environments.
A utility program called Tuner is also supplied which can be used to set
the frequency of each station and to monitor each station through the
PC’s standard sound card or motherboard sound port. The Tuner program
also provides relative signal strength indicator bars which may be useful in
adjusting antenna placement.
The card is factory-configured for 6 (PC-AM6), 12, 18, 24 or 32 (PC-AM32)
stations, but needs licensing on your PC hardware. It may be expanded in
the field for an additional charge.
System Requirements
Platform:
Windows XP, Server 2003, Vista, Server 2008, 7,
Server2008-R2, 8, Server 2012 (32- or 64-bit
versions)
Processor:
500MHz Pentium II or better
Memory: 128MB
minimum
Motherboard:
PCI Express version 1.0 or later
Other:
Sound card or motherboard sound port for
monitoring
