I have owned Perseus for 5 months now and it has been on DXpedition to
our Seefontein Atlantic West Coast site. I am mainly a BCB MW and NDB
beacon LF DXer. The Perseus is operated next to my marvellous Icom
IC-7600.

Perseus is a top class performer and has all the bell's and whistles
of an expensive conventional receiver. It's filters are top line and I
found the NR noise reduction even better than my Icom. It is just as
good as the Icom at digging the most difficult stations out of the mud
and is a top class DX machine. It is particularly good at finding
those elusive weak NDB beacons on LF.

Owning Perseus requires you to have a top end laptop, otherwise it
will not be able to successfully record the wide 1.6 MHz span, a major
feature of Perseus. Also you have to do something about the sound, as
the laptop just doesn't produce decent audio. So, be aware that buying
Perseus is not the end of your financial outlay.

Taking Perseus on a powerless DXpedition is a pain - you have to have
power for your laptop and Perseus requires a quirky 5v DC. I did kit
myself out for all this and captured some good TOH top of hour
recordings of the MW+LF band. Analysing these recordings afterwards
yielded a mixed bag. On the plus side I was able to log stations with
good ID's that I had not found with the Icom, but I also had some good
ID's from the Icom that were simply not heard on Perseus. But it's
swings and roundabouts - what you loose on Perseus due to it's lack of
sensitivity and high noise floor, you gain from the extra stations you
hear resulting from recording the full MW band at TOH.

Perseus is not as sensitive as the Icom and introduces more noise,
plus the recording seems to add further noise, that is why you loose
some of the weaker stations.

I am from the older generation and not very computer literate. Perseus
requires some good computer knowledge to install properly and do the
updates that come along. This is reflected on the Perseus news group
as the number of software queries is quite large. I would have
expected the suppliers of this not inexpensive SDR to supply "auto
run" software and updates for the many computer illiterate users like
myself..

All in all a worthy SDR which I give 4 stars out of 5.

John Plimmer, Montagu, Western Cape Province, South Africa
South 33 d 47 m 32 s, East 20 d 07 m 32 s
Icom IC-7600, Perseus SDR
ERGO software
Drake SW8. Sangean 803A, Redsun RP2100
Sony 7600D, GE SRIII, Grundig G8, Eton E100
Antenna's RF Systems DX 1 Pro Mk II, Datong AD-270
Kiwa MW Loop.
http://www.dxing.info/about/dxers/plimmer.dx


FOOTNOTE for those wanting a 5v power supply for Perseus

The Futurlec board worked perfectly - it did not get hot at all and
had 12.5 to 13v DC into it and gave out a constant 5v DC to Perseus
: http://www.futurlec.com/Mini_Power.shtml
It did not emit any detectable RFI