[dsd]

Does anyone have a good reccomendation for an HF transceiver? It seems like many popular SDRs are receive only or crazy expensive. I've been looking at the RS-HFIQ (https://www.hobbypcb.com/index.php/products/hf-radio/rs-hfiq) but it doesn't seem to be that popular and I can't tell if it's because it's got too much "hacker" in it for the average ham, or if something else is going on. Maybe I should just spend more money?

[elcritch]

I've never tried any of them, but [Crowd Supply](https://www.crowdsupply.com) has a lot of SDR projects that look reasonable (like LimeSDR, etc). Maybe others can comment if they've tried any of them.

[th0ma5]

There is a duality between affordable and performance. For example, the Hack RF is pretty great and has a large frequency range and wide bandwidth for a relatively small cost. But for HF transceiving you need probably need better filtering, which has to be specific to the band and mode, amplifiers both ways, although, with transmission you probably need several stages of amplifiers and filtering in each stage as well. So all of those things would be costly and depending on what you want to do it may be better to buy a regular radio.

[dsd]

I agree with the duality that you describe. Nevertheless, wouldn't the software part of an SDR reduce the need for expensive physical electronic components, while increasing ability? An amplifier seems to be the only additional expense (as you pointed out). It seems like the amplifier negates any cost benefit, yet utility remains superior if one doens't consider multiple components and building blocks a liability. It seems like there are expensive SDR transceivers (e.g. Flexradio) which utilize SDR technology to beat out the competition in specs and performance. To get on the air with a budget SDR, I haven't seen lots of demand for the idea. is the utility of a budget SDR just not better than your basic radio? It seems like it to me but where's the demand?