Winradio

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Radixon Group
(trading as WiNRADiO Communications)
Type Private
Genre Technology
Founded 1991
Founder Milan Hudecek
Headquarters Melbourne, Australia
Area served Worldwide
Industry Communications
Products Radio communications products
Website www.winradio.com

WiNRADiO is the name of a manufacturer of radio communication equipment as well as a brand name applied to computer-based radio receivers, software, antennas and accessories. WiNRADiO is based in Melbourne, Australia. The name WiNRADiO is in fact just a brand name, or trading name, of the company, whose real name is Radixon Group. This trading name was adopted as a result of market success of the company's first product, the "WinRadio Card". This was an ISA bus card which transformed a Windows-based computer into a wide-coverage communications receiver, making it possible to receive point-to-point communications (ham radio, utilities, police, space research, etc.) on an ordinary PC.

An article describing these early WiNRADiO products appeared in 1998 in the WIRED magazine: WiNRADiO Gives Low-Fi Tech a New Face.

Other articles or reviews of WiNRADiO receivers appeared in several radio magazines, including World Radio TV Handbook, Monitoring Times and Passport to World Band Radio.

The company also acts as official distributor of the DRM (Digital Radio Mondiale) demodulator/decoder software, a result of the collaborative DRM Software Radio project between VT Merlin Communications, Fraunhofer Institute Integrierte Schaltungen and Coding Technologies.

Apart from general-purpose radio, some unusual applications of WiNRADiO receivers have been reported, such as in radio astronomy, or SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Project Argus.

WiNRADiO receivers are also reported applied in audio engineering for stage performances, in particular for spectrum analysis of wireless microphones (Neil Diamond tour, Shure Wireless WorkBench).

Despite the Windows affiliation implied by the name, the WiNRADiO receivers are also available for Macintosh and Linux platforms. Linux source codes to control WiNRADiO receivers is available on several sites as a result of collaborative user effort, including the LinRadio and SourceForge.

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