%0 Journal Article %T Communication with Less Hardware %A Ambily Joseph %A Jaini Sara Babu %A K. P. Soman %J International Journal of Computer Technology and Applications %D 2012 %I Technopark Publications %X Software Defined Radio is an emerging technology inthe field of communication. In this paper, twoapplications based on SDR are discussed. First wediscuss the weather satellite image decoding using aSDR receiver, FUNcube Dongle (FCD). Second,Sudden Ionospheric Disturbances (SID)are studiedwith Software Defined Radio (SDR) and Gnu radioframework using VLF signal captured from IndianNavy Station VTX3 that transmits at 18.2 kHz. Boththese applications require very less hardware andhence they are very much cost effective %U http://ijcta.com/documents/volumes/vol3issue4/ijcta2012030438.pdf