The Hermes Lite 2 (HL2) amateur radio direct sampling HF SDR transceiver board is now active for a group buy over on Makerfabs. The price is $225.70, and there need to be 25 orders before the group buy is confirmed. If confirmed, production will begin on 23 September, with production estimated to take about one month. More information about the group buy available on the Hermes Lite 2 Wiki. The N2ADR filter board for transmitting with the HL2 is also available on Makerfabs for $52.70.

The HPSDR Hermes SDR is an open source amateur radio SDR transceiver project that was released as far back as 2011. More recently Steve Haynal has been working on a Hermes-Lite project which is intended to be an opensource open hardware low cost amateur radio HF transceiver that is based on the HPSDR Hermes SDR project software and FPGA DSP implementation.

The Hermes-Lite is able to be very low cost because at it's core is the AD9866 chip which is a mass produced RF front end (LNA + ADC & DAC) that is commonly used in cable modems. Because it is a mass produced commodity, the chip only costs approx. US$35-$25 on Mouser depending on quantity. The chip has a 12-bit 80 MHz ADC and DAC, meaning that if used without any analog mixer front end (like in the Hermes-Lite) it can receive the entire spectrum between 0.1 to 38 MHz all at once.

The Hermes-Lite is also a lot more than just the RF chip, as it contains a set of switched RF filters and a 5W power amplifier for TX. It also interfaces with a PC via Ethernet and has a built in FPGA for DSP processing.