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Apologies if this is posted in the wrong thread

 

Recently i came into ownership of multiple old Dell Precision towers, and in one of them was this strange PCIE card.

Upon further investigation I found it to be a radio capture card for recording radio stations, which in all honesty is actually kinda cool. It is a SONIFEX PC-FM6 FM REV. 3.2 Radio capture card. A quick google search brought me to a few websites selling this card for around $1800 USD, and even almost $6000. I have looked on eBay, but no results come up

I was wondering if anyone knows anything about this card, is it really worth that much, or are the websites having trouble converting currencies, any help would be appreciated thanks.

 

Here are a few links to some sites that had it for sale

https://broadcaststoreeurope.com/shop/93-rf-monitoringmeasuring/4743-sonifex-pc-fm-fm-pcie-radio-capture-card---6-channel/ 

https://onair.au/audio/capture_playback/son-pc-fm32?srsltid=AfmBOoo79NovE72OkI250jIdNHtZ1AWhS1AX_AZLBQNqp7KxUtwHG5-S

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Niche/specialist devices can be really expensive when they are new, as the people who really need them will tend to be businesses who need that functionality and up front cost isn't that critical to a point. This one does sound a bit more general but it wont reach the same pricing level. I see drivers are available and it is worth trying it out and making sure it at least appears to work. Can't help with the pricing beyond that, other than to say it is worth what someone else is willing to pay for it. You can try listing it on sale sites other than ebay and see if you get any interest at a higher price, then reduce until you get a bite.

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13 hours ago, porina said:

Niche/specialist devices can be really expensive when they are new, as the people who really need them will tend to be businesses who need that functionality and up front cost isn't that critical to a point. This one does sound a bit more general but it wont reach the same pricing level. I see drivers are available and it is worth trying it out and making sure it at least appears to work. Can't help with the pricing beyond that, other than to say it is worth what someone else is willing to pay for it. You can try listing it on sale sites other than ebay and see if you get any interest at a higher price, then reduce until you get a bite.

Ahhhh yes that does make sense. Well ill certainly give it a shot somewhere like ebay!

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  • 3 weeks later...

it's a 1800$ card that has maybe 100$ worth of hardware, the FPGA chip being the most expensive at around $20-$60 (depending on pin count and internal memory) 

 

The board is basically 6 FM tuners  and the big chip has a pci-e controller to connect the board to the system using one pci-e lane and probably behaves like a custom sound card with 6 stereo inputs. Maybe the chip also does some mp3/ac3 encoding of the audio, but unlikely. 

 

The FM tuners are not expensive, there's digital fm tuner chips that are a few dollars a piece ... for example Si4731 costs 5$ a piece, but probably  under 2$ if you order 1000 : https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/skyworks-solutions-inc/SI4731-D60-GU/2687007

 

Mikroe even has boards with it for around 60$ (they're selling a $10-15 board for $60, good markups) : https://www.mikroe.com/amfm-click

 

Not saying this is the tuner chip the fancy board uses, maybe it's something more complex with more settings specific to fm radio, but I doubt it.  

 

You're paying for being niche product and for the drivers, and the software that comes with the card ...  you could easily make these days a  usb powered fm tuner that you could configure through either buttons or some web based interface (put a wireless microcontroller on the board) and have a usb sound card chip so that the fm tuner shows up as a sound card in the system. 

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