A simple, low‐cost pulse nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer is described. There are two key features of the instrument: (1) all radio frequency phase shifting is done digitally with a new‐generation frequency synthesizer and (2) the pulse programmer is based on a high‐speed 32‐bit parallel interface card in a desktop computer. The spectrometer is well suited for single‐frequency channel experiments such as nuclear quadrupole resonance and deuterium quadrupole echo NMR experiments. Because the rf phase shifting is done digitally, the spectrometer operates easily over a wide frequency range, here 10–300 MHz. The pulse programmer and other software functions are written in LabView, a graphical programming language.