hardware: a/d convertor circut?

Hi,

I've started messing about with radios again and decided to see if there was any software to do basic radio astronomy out there. By amaeteur I mean such lofty goals as trying to detect the sun!

Much of the software takes input from the serial/parallel port of the PC, and many expensive radios provide this digital output as standard.

Mine however dont, so I need to make an analogue to digital convertor. So has anyone else tried to do this before and have a circut diagram I can use? I vaguely remember doing this in college but I've forgotton the details (quite a few college memories are blurry )

Cheers,
~Al

albert,
wouldn't know much about this but here are two links you maybe interested.
radiosky.com/
radiojove.gsfc.nasa.gov/

on the radio sky there is some software called radio sky pipe that lets you use you pc's sound card . would that not achieve the same thing?. see below.
www.radiosky.com/skypipeishere.html
stephen.

albert,
wouldn't know much about this but here are two links you maybe interested.
radiosky.com/
radiojove.gsfc.nasa.gov/

on the radio sky there is some software called radio sky pipe that lets you use you pc's sound card .

The radio jove site is depressing.... you spend hours getting youre head around something only to discover that schoolchildren wil a $100 kit understand more than you do

Sky pipe is fairly good, though apparently sound cards are only good for certain types of observations. apparently `the audio bandwith isnt sensite enough on a soundcard`, and the card has to average the input its getting rather than having a clock on a chip give a discrete digital input. Its good for picking up meteors though I've only had limited success with that either, then again the hi-fi beside the PC probably isnt an ideal setup for radioastronomy

That radiosky site looks interesting though.

Thanks,
~Al