AOR AR8000 Panadapter Interface

The following post will describe how to take the IF from the radio scanner AR8000 by AOR and feed it to an SDR, this is useful to see the spectrum around the tuned frequency and/or use sdr sharp and its plugins to decode, for example, TETRA signals.

First you have to open the back of our radio removing the screws marked in the pics below:

Open and find a stripe of 16 pins, you are on the back of the board, see the red circle on the pic below:

Now, the IF output is the 10th pin from the left, the 6th from the right.
Solder a 100pf capacitor to decouple the radio from the sdr and to prevent sdr with bias tee to inject some current.

Add a cable taking the earth from the negative pin of the battery or from other place you like,
and a panel female connector, I choose to use a 2,5mm mono jack, and fix it on one side

You can close the radio now and make a cable to connect the IF out to an SDR, in my case a 2,5mm mono jack male to SMA.

Connect SDR to your PC and open SDR# or other sdr software you like.

According to AOR manuals you have to tune the following IFs, depending on the frequency sintonized:

from 100kHz to 450MHz and from 1500 to 1950MHz IF is at 736,250MHz

from 450 to 1500MHz IF is at 275,450MHz

Below are two examples:

Broadcast FM signals, radio set on 88MHz SDR# on 736,250MHz

TETRA signal, radio set on 463MHz and SDR# on 275,450MHz