The problem with the device in your picture is:
a) It's much bigger than the standard Pi footprint
b) Its GPIO pins need to be on the right hand edge to fit into the sbitx box (see attachment)
c) It needs that external USB3 bridge connector and that won't work mechanically without modifying the case
If you could find a SSD daughter card that fits within the standard Pi footprint and mounts below the Pi I think it would work. Also you might need to modify the case if you need to run the signal from the standard USB connectors to the daughter card.
I found a picture of an opened sbitx by googling, it is at and attached it to this post.
The Pi mounts upside-down to the 40 bin connector in the upper right hand corner. You can see the standoffs it gets screwed into. I took mine apart for the first time just to check and in my opinion there is plenty of room for a SSD daughter card. There is a decent sized gap between the Pi and the bottom of the display above it. By eyeballing I'd say the gap is at least as much as the height of the Pi itself.
I'm not understanding the concerns about the amount of RF the Pi is subject to. The Pi is already inside the enclosure with the electronics that generate high power HF radio energy, as is its SD Card media, and I'm not seeing how adding a SSD would change things significantly. I also don't think adding a SSD is changing the power or heat budget enough to be a concern.
Eventually I am going to try to find a solution to having NVMe storage with sbitx. I think I will end up just using an external USB3 NVMe adapter while I have the sbitx at home. I believe the Pi bootloader has settings so that you can favor booting USB and fall back to the SDCARD when a USB device is not present. Therefore I could do software development with the fast NVMe storage attached and when I build an image I like I can just copy it to the SDCARD so it is present when I want to take the sbitx away from my home station.
My approach to mounting such a NVMe would be something that might make people here gag, but it'd be industrial strength velcro. It's definitely strong enough to hold a USB3 NVMe adapter. It's also very important to not allow the connection to wiggle mechanically. Linux more or less expects the disk IO to work without failures. It gets very unhappy with anything but rare disk IO errors. I learned this the hard way.
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Regards,
Dave, N1AI
Dave, N1AI
