Group Kickstarting a High-Bandwidth Software Defined Radio (SDR) Peripheral 140
TwineLogic writes "Many Slashdot readers have been enjoying the availability of $20 USB radios which can tune in the range of 50MHz-2GHz. These devices, while cheap, have limited bandwidth (about 2MHz) and minimal resolution (8-bit). Nuand, a new start-up from Santa Clara, wants to improve on that. Their Kickstarter proposal for bladeRF, a Software Defined Radio transceiver, will support 20MHz bandwidth and 12-bit samples. The frequency range to be covered is planned as 300MHz-3.6Ghz. In addition to the extended spectrum coverage, higher bandwidth, and increased resolution, the bladeRF will have an on-board FPGA capable of performing signal processing and an Altera processor as well. SDR hobbyists have been using the inexpensive receivers to decode airplane data transmission giving locations and mechanical condition, GPS signals, and many other digital signals traveling through the air around us. This new device would extend the range of inexpensive SDRs beyond the spectrum of 2.4GHz Wi-Fi. In addition, the peripheral includes a low-power transmitter which the experimenter can use without needing a 'Ham' license."
300 mhz and up? (Score:4, Insightful)
Mmmpf. HF is where all the fun is. :)
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Get a downconverter. You know, a 400 mhz oscillator, a mixer, and some filters.
Re:300 mhz and up? (Score:5, Funny)
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How hard can it be? Whenever I'm in meetings the clock always seems to run at half speed. That's 500 millihertz right there.
I bet it's not stable though. You watch the clock more closely next time - I bet two ticks are never quite the same.
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You can get some very very good VCTCXO's and rubidium atomic clocks second hand if you're a radio amateur guy. They used to be combined in cel towers with crystal oscillators. If you look at the root-allan-variance plot, quarts oscillators have poor long-term stabilit
Re:300 mhz and up? -- narrow-band comments (Score:1)
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I get quite annoyed when people randomly substitute the big M with the little m. 1 mm (1 millimeter) is the thickness of a dime. 1 Mm (1 megameter) is about 620 miles. Those who can't tell the difference have no business trying to tell anyone anything. I won't call them stupid though. No I won't.
That's a fight you are never going to win, you prove this by claiming the superiority of SI and then use miles in the same sentence.. One megameter actually makes no sense, you just write 1000 km.
The worst idea ever was to make a bit equal a small "b", and a byte a capital B. brrrr.
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The worst idea ever was to make a bit equal a small "b", and a byte a capital B. brrrr.
Why? It always made sense to me. SI is largely base 10, so the difference between a lowercase letter and a uppercase letter is some kind of factor of 10. Yes, I know that is heavily generalized.
Meanwhile, you can think of computers operating in base 8 (aka, Octal). Here, the difference is a factor of 8.
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Meh; I've become an appliance operator as far as ham goes. I turn on my 2m rig only when the weather's nasty. I might like to do HF again, though, if I had the equipment.
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The thing you need to know about those sticks is that they are *really* prone to overload and various nasty IM-like failure modes. Fun, you bet, but you kinda get what you pay for there. If you want them to work well, you'll spend ten times the effort on filters in between the antenna system and the unit in most install situations. In a really rural area you could get away with it, as everything is (relatively) weak then.
Best one out there right now is about $200 US, it's the FUNcube pro+ dongle. That's nea
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I came to the comments looking for a mention of the Funcube Dongle. Such a good little device for the size and cost.
I can't get to flickr from where I am right now, so a quick question - does your software support tuning the FCD or do I still need their util to go with it ?
30 mhz and down (Score:3)
For HF:
SDR-IQ (about $500 from RFSPACE or a store) and my SdrDx software [flickr.com] (free) -- Windows and Mac versions. 14 bit decoding, USB connection to the computer, ethernet server software (free) available so you can remote the head unit.
192 kHz bw coverage from a few Hz to 30 Mhz: AM, SAM, FM, USB, LSB, CW... output to (free) decoding for SSTV, WEFAX, RTTY, Olivia, Contestia, Domino, Heil, DREAM (digital SW broadcasts), MFSK, MT63, PSK, QPSK, PSKR, THOR, THROB, NAVTEX/SITORB... pretty much you name it.
RF waterfa
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No, the reason is that TFS says "The frequency range to be covered is planned as 300MHz-3.6Ghz.", and "12-bit samples" and this is slashdot, pal. You're bloody lucky I read TFS. lol.
And given that TFS puts the F range at "why would I be interested in that?", and the sample depth at "yawn", why would I *then* go researching more about the unit?
As for my involvement, if any SDR manufacturer wants support, I've been willing to write it free of charge. Just FYI. I've probably put as many hours into the whole SD
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I couldn't care less about Ham bands, but 450 MHz and 120 MHz would be "nice to have," as well as 1090 MHz. But I only need 850Mhz - 869MHz.
This bladeRF looks perfect for me.
By the way, I live a few blocks from a commercial
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Probably should grab a copy of "cuteSDR" and get the linux version working (it's a QT project.) From there, build yourself an ethernet server for your chosen SDR (there are linux examples out there), and you're up.
So what's at 850-869 mhz of $400 worth of interest to you?
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I can't help but notice that I didn't claim there was one. :) You do know what a "straw man" is, right?
CuteSDR is a great starter app that can be tweaked to work with anything. You di
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If, as you say, you write your own software, then "linux support" is pretty irrelevant
By "linux support," what I mean is either a working USB driver for it, or a data sheet if there's no USB driver. The bladeRF is open hardware, with even the schematic available and all chips having public data sheets. A device that does not support linux would be a device with no programming information and no driver. I imagine they exist, but maybe I am wrong and there is no such device in the existing market of devices made by hams.
I can't help but notice that I didn't claim there was one. :) You do know what a "straw man" is, right?
You claimed this device wasn't as good as the devices which already
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My comment was spot on accurate, near as I can tell. So I'm perfectly happy to take it as "my fault".
If the thing starts at 300 mhz, as TFS says it does, then there's the basis for the comment.
As for the rest, ok, whatever. You have a nice day.
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Couple of points in your favor, in case the argument gets any more technical. :)
1) Strong out-of-band signals can actually improve the real-world dynamic range of an SDR, because their effect is more or less the same as dithering. As long as the overall input voltage range isn't exceeded, I wouldn't necessarily expect a lot of interference.
2) 8 bits gives ~50 dB of dynamic range at the full bandwidth. If your 8-bit front end is 1 GHz wide but your ultimate demodulation process runs at 1 kHz, you have abou
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Exercise for the student: that SmartNet system carries all of information needed to locate every cop car in town, whether they know it or not. Plot 'em with Google Maps in real time!
Sorry, this is incorrect, as far as I know. You might be thinking of various "automatic vehicle location systems" (AVLS), or perhaps there is a smartnet feature I'm not aware of. Our local police and fire use a disjoint AVLS solution from the smartnet. The police AVLS is in the clear, but requires pinging the car, causing a chime in the car. The fire AVLS is always transmitting. There is good reason not to encrypt the police AVLS -- it is only queried duri
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Nah, even knowing that, it's motivated by the fact that connecting the DAC to anything would be a royal PITA. There are SDRs out there that plug an play almost DC to L band; slap 'em into the USB port and get on with it.
Sorry, there are just too many good SDRs out there already that are basically plug and play USB or ethernet. 14 bit, 16 bit and more. A 12 bit SDR that doesn't get below 300 Mhz? Nah. Not really in the running unless you want to deal with the (very, very few) interesting signals above 2 GHz
Re:300 mhz and up? (Score:5, Informative)
LOL. Well, let's see. International shortwave broadcasts, both analog and digital. You know, news about other than the Kardashians. AM radio broadcasts (US and elsewhere, depending on your antenna systems.) Longwave broadcasts. Aero beacons. Military and utility monitoring. Solar flare monitoring. Monitoring ultrasonics, such as bats and insects. Submarine communications. Time stations. Citizens band. R/c device monitoring. Coast guard. Commercial marine communications. Weather reports (teletype, naxtex, FAX WX maps, greyscale satellite images.) All kinds of analysis of all of these. And yes, all kinds of ham radio monitoring too... you don't have to be a ham to listen and/or decode. There are eleven ham bands in the range 0-30 Mhz.
Just a brief overview, of course. HF is where the fun is, I assure you. I can monitor from almost DC to several GHz here, and HF is definitely where it's at as far as I'm concerned.
Propagation (Score:2)
I should also have mentioned that LF, MF and HF signal propagation is endlessly entertaining. If you roll that way. I do. :)
Re:300 mhz and up? (Score:4, Interesting)
International shortwave broadcasts, both analog and digital. You know, news about other than the Kardashians. AM radio broadcasts (US and elsewhere, depending on your antenna systems.) Longwave broadcasts.
It's true those are all present, but "interesting" is in the ear of the listener. None of those qualify as "interesting" in my book.
Aero beacons.
You mean like VOR? Those are up in the low 100MHz, of course...
Military and utility monitoring
Army ground is 40.5 MHz, again 40.5 > 30. Are there other military signals (we'll get to ELF in a minute)? What utility signals are below 30 MHz? I see them in the 400s around here.
Solar flare monitoring.
Ok this is a little interesting, I'll give you this one.
Monitoring ultrasonics, such as bats and insects.
Ummmmm. Those little buggers use radios?
Submarine communications.
These are on ELF, I'll give you that. But they are encrypted, of course, and they are also immune to traffic analysis. What is fun about monitoring them? Plesae don't tell me these are in the clear...
Time stations.
What is interesting or useful about this, especially given the GPS timebase being globally available?
Citizens band.
One person's interesting is another person's ridiculous, I suppose.
R/c device monitoring.
You mean 27MHz R/C? The servo signal seems particularly boring, unless you are operating the R/C device, in which case you can look at it.
Coast guard. Commercial marine communications. Weather reports (teletype, naxtex, FAX WX maps, greyscale satellite images.)
All of these are somewhat interesting, I'll give you that.
HF is where the fun is, I assure you.
I'm having more fun at higher frequencies, I assure you. I think 1090 MHz is more interesting than anything you mentioned. 121.5 is worthy of note. The 450s and 850s (public safety and government) are pretty interesting to most people. Other people enjoy trying to figure out SCADA traffic in the 400's.
My complaint with your Score-5 first post is that you are pooping on a great project because your personal interests don't align. You're a ham. You think that is interesting. Good for you. As a ham, you also have a certain "authority" with some people. That authority is misused or misplaced when you dismiss a good project on the basis of having made an engineering decision that fits the interests of others, but not yours. I am very interested in getting access to the 2.4GHz wi-fi spectrum at the level of the signal. But my interests are more in software, software security, and things like that. So this particular SDR example from RFSPACE is of pretty much zero interest to me.
This (Score:2)
Mod up, please. Informative for me, would mod you as such if I could. Thank you.
Re:300 mhz and up? (Score:5, Interesting)
No. I'm talking about CW format beacons. They're all below 540 kHz. Very useful to see what LW prop is going on.
Well, sure. That's the way everything is, isn't it? I'm answering you from my perspective, because you asked me.
Yes, tons of 'em. Not just out of the US, either. You can also see spectrum probes sliding across the various portions of HF; hear mystery "coded" signals (numbers stations), even see some weird stuff that's (thus far) eluded any explanation, like slow carriers that transit the 49 meter SW band, right through the commercial stations and a very sedate and extremely stable pace. No idea what that is. Just find it interesting.
LOL, thanks.
All you do is for your "antenna", you hook up a tweeter or a supertweeter, and hang it out by your eaves, attic entrance, etc. Feed that to the SDR-IQ. All manner of hilarity ensues. Including the lady of the house going "what, bats? We have BATS?!?!?"
Well, they're also typically frequency references. You can do a number of things with them. First, they tell you about propagation (because they're always on, so you know what's on bounce by what you can hear.) You can do some cool experiments like these [radiohobbyist.org]. They give you deep sea weather reports, too. WWVH (Hawaii) and WWV (Colorado) give you an instant tip because one uses a womans voice, the other a mans. You can tell how prop is going by what you hear. There is also BCD coded time on there. And many nations have time signals, if you know where they are (and my software does.)
Well, yes, exactly. CB is bloody hilarious to listen to. At least to me. And it also, because it's so busy, serves as another type of prop indicator. Even if the ham bands are dead, for instance, you can tell they are open, just not in use, when the CB bands are open.
What it tells me is that it's time to go outside and check the skies for our local air club, so I find it quite useful. Think of it as a "beacon for fun." I can also tell the guys if they're making a mess - too broad, etc. Listening is not everything; analysis and reaction is interesting as well.
Ok, great. More power to you.
Dude, seriously, don't blame ME for slashdot moderation. It's totally broken and I've said so for years, but in any case, I didn't mod the darned post myself so I don't see how I should accept any blame for it whatsoever. Seriously. The mods here are only on crack when they aren't on meth. It's something in the perl code. Nasty stuff. As for the first post, I saw the story (twitter
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Coast guard. Commercial marine communications. Weather reports (teletype, naxtex, FAX WX maps, greyscale satellite images.)
All of these are somewhat interesting, I'll give you that.
Aren't marine communication transmitted in VHF (~156MHz), and weather satellite images at 137Mhz? Well outside the 30Mhz upper limit of the RFSPACE device?
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The big one that nobody has mentioned is Wireless M-Bus on 168MHz. It is used for all kinds of metering applications - electricity, water, gas and so forth. There are a vast number of devices already using it.
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Expressing ones opinion on the internet is like farting in a hurricane. You may feel better for a moment, but nobody's gonna care.
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How does this compare with the Ettus USRP B100? (Score:1)
The foremost question on my mind is how this compares with the devices from Ettus, like the USRP B100 The $400 minimum price (which the summary helpfully fails to mention) is not bad but there's not exactly a lot of history backing bladeRF up.
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Simply put, we don't need this as a commercial product, it brings nothing new to the table whilst further diluting the very finite pool of customers for research grade SDR's, making it a less viable market for any company. Lowering pricing is not a reason alone to do something like this, healthy margins are necessary to make niche companies viable, let alone thrive. Thus GNURadio in this particular case is largely built on the back of the revenue from USRP's and an increasing number of folks are taking a fr
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Yeah, those open-source frameworks like GNU Radio are great, up until the point where someone actually takes advantage of them. </rolleyes>
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What bladerf is offering is a lot of bandwidth, both RF and baseband, for relatively little money.
The USRP and other Ettus platforms don't do USB 3.0. They offer an extremely expensive receiver with a YIG synthesizer and a 10-GbE interface that goes to 4 GHz, but if your employer has more than three letters in its name you probably will never get to mess with one. bladerf can be thought of as an entry-level platform for high-bandwidth work.
Some people have pushed the older USRP boards to grab most/all of
Wy not cover the whole band at once? (Score:3)
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It's inevitable that we'll eventually digitize the air that we breathe.
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Yup, I'm looking at eight 10gig Ethernet cables.
WUT? Have you considered, oh, I dunno, PCI Express x16? They do make extension cables for that, to get outside the chassis.
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...they can recognize hundreds of molecules, and subtitles of radio spectra...
What are the radio spectra subtitles saying? Are they in Japanese?
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Dirty little secret - they don't work that way. They all interleave ADCs. They're not hoarding either because those 8GHz scopes aren't exactly big movers (they're most likely hand assembled becuase few are actuall
Can they change the way my Smart Phone GPS works? (Score:2)
SDR hobbyists have been using the inexpensive receivers to decode airplane data transmission giving locations and mechanical condition, GPS signals, and many other digital signals traveling through the air around us.
I mean, I would like to use my smartphone as a GPS without requiring a data connection (strictly speaking);
Just like how those GPS units from Garmin, TomTom et al work.
Possible?
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That's just a case of finding (or writing) an app for your phone that uses the normal GPS receiver and a suitable pile of maps. The difficulty is not the data connection, it's storing and rendering all the map data.
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Which, in turn, really isn't that much of a difficulty. The guy even compares it to a TomTom, and those generally have less than 2GB of storage as it is and will still let you store even the smallest of streets + a bunch of other data (e.g. approximate location of a house number along a street, zip codes, etc.) for the better part of a continent.
Somebody already mentioned Osmand, I myself tend to use Navfree. Works just fine as long as you ignore some of the routing they provide (right turn + U-turn + rig
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I have downloaded more than 400MB of map data but in order to even get directions to some place (on the map I have downloaded), my smartphone says it needs a data connection for this! Trouble! I will try those other solutions and report accordingly.
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Many phone map apps don't do the route-finding on the device, even if they have the map data - they request the route from a remote server. The maps are for display only.
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I've been using Osmand to do that on my Android phone for years. You just need to download maps for the area around you beforehand.
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The data connction is used for two things:
Almanac - not strictly needed, as it's transmitted with the GPS signlas, but at sub-dialup speeds.
Maps - needed, but nobody said they have to be streamed. Google just pretty much decided they should and dragged everyone along. Nokia maps has long had the option of downloading local copies of the maps. There are also apps, like TomTom's, which provide essentially everything present on a standalone GPS device, usually with a subscription payment model.
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The map scrolling and zooming is faster than my Garmin and TomTom dedicated units, too.
You can do it today (Score:2)
I could not get your question. Even today, you can use your phones GPS without data connection. Many offline navigation apps exist which do not require data(only one time to download the app and the map for your country) on your phone.
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Well, I thought I'd be able to use the phone's GPS without a data connection.
My Samsung Galaxy S3 immediately "tells" me, "Cannot complete action without a data connection," the moment I try to enter a direction -- even with the GPS enabled. It will only work with a data connection.
Needless to say, I am disappointed.
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My Samsung Galaxy S3 immediately "tells" me, "Cannot complete action without a data connection," the moment I try to enter a direction
How does it tell you this? Does it talk to you? Send you a memo?
Its the App (Score:2)
You are running something like google maps app which required data connection for navigation. There exist many free OSM based apps which work without data connection. example OSMAND
If you want better routing etc., you can go with sygic app(39 USD), for full featured experience like your in car garmin/tomtom
Expansion Boards Interfaces (Score:5, Informative)
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I went to college with Robert, and ordered one of these on day 1 of the kickstarter. Tell Robert to get his ass in gear and make the downconverter - I need it to use for my intended purpose (tune 75MHz) :-)
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Have you obtained FCC type acceptance pursuant to Part 15, Subpart J of the Rules?
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If it doesn't transmit, then strictly speaking it's not necessary. Just sayin'.
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Lame (Score:2)
This is gonna cost like $300-$400. Nobody is going to buy that except maybe a few researchers or dedicated RF hobbyists.
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And it's not lame. They are doing an amazing piece of hardware, and even if it's pricey today, it is a start. I am pretty sure the price will go down in the following years, and more and more people will be able to use it.
As the time of writing, they have already passed $34k, and I am sure they will hit the $100k mark soon. I don't have that much money to invest on them, otherwise I would already been waiting for my unit to come.
And I am not a researcher nor a dedicated hobbist.
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Re:Lame (Score:4, Interesting)
...of which there seem to be a very large number.
Heck, there are a *lot* of brands of SDRs out there for sale. It's quite surprising, perhaps, but there it is. I own several.
The thing is, you can get far better performance out of a decent SDR than you can out of any analog radio ever made. For a fraction of the cost, and with features you could never have had.
Just think of the many radios that have sold in the past, then imagine all those people waking up to the idea that they can have tons more performance. Everything from AM radio and SW radio to ham radio and police monitoring... all for relatively cheap and *amazing* performance.
How different? You could have bought yourself an ICOM R-8000 for over ten thousand dollars... yet today, slap a little box down on your desk and *wildly* outperform the thing. For a few hundred bucks.
Every radio person I've been the first to show my SDR systems to has done the gape/jaw-drop thing. Every one. And well they should. My friend Bob told me "It seems like you're cheating" :)
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Can you define what you mean by "performance" above? Nothing I've read about amateur SDRs has shown them to "wildly" outperform analog radios in:
MDS
Noise figure
Blocking dynamic range
Intermod
Desense
Third-order intercept
Power consumption
In fact, certain SDR architectures may include things like spurious-free dynamic range impairments that are significantly *inferior* to analog radios. I don't deny that there are many things an SDR can do that an analog radio simply can't, chief among them being accommodate
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SDR performance advantages: ability to dig signal out of noise. Ability to remove noise. Ability to control the bandpass. Sharpness of filtering. Ability to see what's going on around the signal, and spot signals, in unbelievably low-signal or high noise conditions -- or both. Time division multiplex filters that pull out many carriers at one time and leave excellent audio behind. Ability to ID digital signals visually in just moments... every type of digital signal has a different spectral "signature", and
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Okay, so most significantly what I'm hearing is superior weak-signal performance by virtue of good DSP. I'll buy that. Your point about front-ends and the "stick" SDRs is well taken. I've never taken these things seriously because I take a look at most of the front-ends and there's...nothing. No filtering, no shielding, no preselection. And to think that some of them are 8-10 bits and depend heavily on pre-converter gain management, with nothing more than a silicon VGA with a few hundred microamps at b
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And speaking of front-ends, there's some funky stuff going on in the bladeRF's:
http://nuand.com/bladerf.pdf [nuand.com]
C331, the receive switch blocking cap, is 6.8pF. At 300 MHz, it has a capacitive reactance of 78 ohms. Unless there's a good reason for that (e.g. RF tuning), that's pretty irregular. Typically switch blocking caps are chosen to have very low reactance at the frequency of interest, so as to minimally perturb the 50 ohm environment of the switch port. The reference curves in the switch datasheet wer
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I know just enough about RF engineering to know that these sound like valid questions. Unfortunately, there has been no response. Perhaps Slashdot isn't the best place to post the query, but some more focused BladeRF forum. I'd like to see a good response.
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8.2 pf = 64 ohms at 300 MHz. That's enough to bypass a short line, but it would be better to parallel it with 1 nF (which by itself will probably be self-resonant around that point, turning into an inductor.)
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I very much want an answer to this question as well, so I'm replying to make the thread stick out more. I want to know what the cheapest dongle that won't make me pull my hair out might be. I don't care too much what frequencies it covers so long as there's some interesting stuff in whatever frequencies it does cover, so that I can at least have something motivating to do with it.
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I third this question.
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good start (Score:2)
over 1/3 of the way there, just a few days after it was announced. Of course, the posting here on slashdot has helped a lot. I hope the momentum continues.
Correction: 28MHz and, yes, it does cover HF band (Score:2)
First, the bandwidth, or amount of spectrum that is instantaneously analyzed, is 28MHz, not 20 as I wrote.
Secondly, some troll^H^H^H^H^H nay-sayer posted that this device cannot be used for HF. In the first place, the device can receive and transmit 0-20MHz because the baseband signal pins of the ADC and DAC are available on a header. In the second place, up-converters easily solve this "problem," whereas hitting 3.8GHz is a great advantage to this device.
When do I get my magic radio? (Score:2)
I am not a Ham. I'm not interested in being one. That said, I have chased listening to some interesting things from time to time. I went to the effort of installing a long line antenna to listen to some shortwave from around the world. I have a scanner I've used to listen in on trains and planes.
What I want is a "magic radio". I want the interface to look something like a google search box, and take a wide range of inputs. I want to be able to enter a radio station call sign, a frequency, a call sign
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becoming the norm (Score:2)
For us not in the know about SDR... (Score:2)
Where's a good primer on what it is, where to buy a good $20 SDR (and which to buy), and what it can be used for?
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Here you go
http://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr
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I suspect there's a zero missing from that price.
People have claimed to get working TV dongles for around that price.
HF and HF bands (Score:2)
I asked Nuand about these and this is what they said.
Hi Bill,
We just posted an update to the kickstarter to address this specific concern. You can find it here:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1085541682/bladerf-usb-30-software-defined-radio/posts/398080 [kickstarter.com]
If that doesn't answer your question, feel free to ask again and I'll try to give a more detailed response.
Rob
To reply to this message, follow this link:
http://www.kickstarter.com/messages/2634058?at=0fa9291fa91a018d&ref=email#reply_open [kickstarter.com]
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and accommodation for hams
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That is correct. US Law requires anyone marketing an intentional radiator obtain FCC equipment authorization under Part 15, Subpart J of "the Rules," _before_ the device is marketed for sale.
There is an exception in 15.23 for home-built devices, but this project does not quality, as the exception in 15.23 only applies to home-built devices, and not those that are purchased in kit form.
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I would assume it is a device that intentionally radiates electromagnetic waves. So not a signal generator, but definitely this device.
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I don't see a big difference.
The big difference is the intent. That is why that word is there.
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Nope. There are still experimenters bands, ham bands, etc. There's even "the lost band" down in LF where we can fool with transmit capabilities without concerning ourselves with the FCC.
In the US, you can also broadcast at low power in the AM and FM broadcast bands, though there are some restrictions on antennas and so forth.
The FCC is basically the enemy of the people here; it spends its time making sure the RF spectrum is kept from the people and given wholesale to corporations. But they've not quite mana