Joe Analssandrini wrote:

Here's a *possible* solution: buy an AOR AR7030 Plus receiver from one
of the shops in England in conjunction with Richard Hillier at AOR UK
(he can make recommendations to you based on your requirements and
will contact the shop of your choice to have the radio specially made
up and shipped to you). Then contact Jan Arkesteijn and download
RxWings (you can e-mail him and get the latest version). You will then
have a superlative receiver which can be used as a stand-alone radio,
a radio controlled by a remote-control device, and a
computer-controlled radio. Should computer standards change in a
number of years, well, you'll still have the stand-alone radio. You
can have your cake and eat it too! (The AR7030 is AT LEAST as good as
the Drake; frankly, I think it's much more versatile and better.) By
the way, Jan's computer control program RxWings is totally FREE!

Joe

P.S. You can tell your wife that this will be the VERY LAST short-wave
radio you'll ever need to buy. If you're lucky, she MAY even believe
you!


The 7030+ is a nice radio, but it's also likely to be several hundred dollars higher than an R8b when equipped with a noise blanker and a couple of high end filters.

On the winradio - my greatest concern is the internal ones.

There are a fair number of people using classic radios that were state of the art 30-50 years ago, and they still work well.

But odds are 30 years from now you won't want to be using the same computer, and newer ones aren't likely to be using PCI cards.

But odds are, no matter what happens with the design of internal cards on a PC, there will be some way of hooking up an RS232 port, so if you have an external winradio, you'll probably still be able to control it.

Software should be less of a problem - I'm pretty sure you can still get emulator software to allow your windoze PC to run 25 year old CP/M software.