  This article reports on the first step in a focused program to re-optimize
radio astronomy receiver architecture to better take advantage of the latest
advancements in commercial digital technology. Specifically, an L-Band
sideband-separating downconverter has been built using a combination of careful
(but ultimately very simple) analog design and digital signal processing to
achieve wideband downconversion of an RFI-rich frequency spectrum to baseband
in a single mixing step, with a fixed-frequency Local Oscillator and stable
sideband isolation exceeding 50 dB over a 12 degree C temperature range.
