Anybody else had any success in tapping the IQ in a receiver
and feeding that into GNURadio?
Yes - haven’t gotten into the 9-10 MHz range IF’s, but I have built
converters for 455 KHz IF’s - overall they work quite well although
there are some slight compromises in the overall system; for example
I’ve found that the AGC action in the host receiver may interfere
somewhat with some types of signals although it’s not usually a severe
problem.
After building several I/Q converters it was discovered that (for our
application) it wasn’t necessary to perform quadrature sampling in
hardware - that is, it was sufficient simply to downconvert the signal
to the center of the soundcard range and sample that conventionally
using a single soundcard input channel. The signal is then “converted”
to the complex format entirely in software (setting the real components
to the input values and stuffing zeros into the imaginary (Q)
components). This has the advantages of simplifying the hardware and of
freeing up one of the two soundcard input channels.
It would no doubt be straightforward to extend these ideas to the 9-10
MHz IF’s. One thing though is that there’s perhaps 50-60 dB more signal
available to work with after the 455 KHz IF amp chain has done its work.
So if you tap into the 9-10 MHz IF you may be looking at building up a
relatively significant amount of RF gain yourself…
Here are links to a couple of my pages containing schematic and other
diagrams, and application notes:
http://www.lightlink.com/mhp/lsm/
http://www.lightlink.com/mhp/iq/
Good luck
Max