I'm guessing that's probably a "no" then. 

It's too late now anyway, as my wallet has just become £160.02 lighter, and I've got lots of bits arriving on Wednesday that all need stringing together in some sort of order.  That gives me three days to sort out what (free) software is the easiest for a complete novice to comprehend.

I'm not sure I understand the question, but if you're wondering what SDR actually is, then this might help explain.  It has little or nothing to do with music, and although one can use SDR to transmit and receive, I'm only interested in receiving.

Below is roughly what my collection of components should look like when hooked up, although I've ordered an improved version of the NooElec NESDR SMArTee which is the "guts" of the radio. The LaNA is an "Ultra-Low-Noise Amplifier," and the Flamingo FM is a notch filter which should cut out any bleed from standard broadcast frequencies.

That lead top-left wanders off to an antenna, and the USB lead bottom-right will connect to the PC.



As I said, it's just something to play around with that's totally new to me, and doesn't cost the earth, although I've already seen a couple more bits I quite like the look of, but won't buy until I know if this "sticks" or not.  There's a gizmo to drag the bottom end frequency down to ham radio level, and another one for decoding Inmarsat data.

Ah, I see.  I was toying with the idea of buying a "scanner" to listen to air and marine bands, that sort of thing, just for fun, for ages, since I binned my old CB Scanner I suuppose, which was probably back in the eighties. Then I stumbled acrosst SDR and it seemed like the best alternative, because it is, in effect, modular, so I can build it with the features I want, and also build it up over time if, as I said above, it sticks.  Also, a lot of the top desktop scanners are made for the American market and have stuff that's not applicable to the UK, so that seemed like another good reason to go SDR.

It's one of those daft things I've always fancied, and a high-end premade desktop scanner/base unit rolls in at four to five times what this startup is costing me.  The difference is if I do end up "improving" it, or I simply want it to do things it can't already do, I can do it a component at a time, as opposed to binning a £400-£500 scanner to buy a £1000+ scanner.  Which, I would probably never do.

I know nothing about them, and a few days ago I'd never even heard of SDR, and that's quite appealing too.  Even us old geezers like a bit of a challenge to keep the brain idling, if not actually turning over at full revs. 

That's it really, it's a variation on a theme of something I've had my eye on for years, I suppose, but I'm making it as difficult as possible for myself.

This is the antenna I'm starting with.



It's 650mm/25¹/₂" tall, and has 4m of cable, so the idea is that it can sit in the window and confuse the neighbours. 

Paul,

Circa 1986, I was on industrial placement and played with an embryonic form of this. A "fast" ADC converted the IF (intermediate frequency) to digital and all the filtering and modulation / demodulation was done in software on one or more DSP chips. I was tasked with building the second generation ADC board.... the selected 10-bit chip from Sony was circa £1000 in 1986 money and employed ECL (emitter coupled logic) as opposed to TTL or CMOS. ECL ran hot, and the chip had my thumb print stuck on it from my "test" to see if it was running very hot (as expected from ECL). The chip was so state of the art, the sample arrived in the salesman's pocket when he flew over from the states.

I was always a bit crap at electronics compared to the software so and this was doubly true of the the low noise ground/power plan shenanigans required for ADC implementation. Techniques wise, the only thing from this board which still lives on is the differential signal nature of ECL. My board of discrete logic which tried to suck more bits of signal out from the noise probably lives inside the ADC today or would be done in SW anyway.

My colleague, was with me on placement and his task was to tidy up their "library" of applications they had written.... basically it was a gazzilion files with names like "test1" and "thisOneWorks". Ironically, at the end of the placement, when he had straightened it all out he was given an award for "making the greatest contribution to a department during a placement"

Upon reflection we both learnt a lot from this placement!!! i.e. I ran away from HW!
  

Long piece of wire should get you going until it arrives.

This is all looking and sounding a bit "Bleep and Booster" to me.