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[Discuss-gnuradio] Re: A low-budget SDR - Was: PCIe know-how?


From: ceriel
Subject: [Discuss-gnuradio] Re: A low-budget SDR - Was: PCIe know-how?
Date: Tue, 6 Mar 2007 22:11:02 +0200

On 3/5/07, Brian Padalino <address@hidden> wrote:
On 3/5/07, address@hidden <address@hidden> wrote:
> (Found the Reply to All button!)

<snip>

That Analog Devices AD9235-65 looks like it's good if you want to
sample at something like the USRP is doing right now - 64MHz.  So what
you'd be looking at is an oscope with a 500MHz bandwidth and a 64MSPS
sampling rate.  You could possibly double that if you did some
cascading of the ADCs and used the opposite edge of the clock to also
clock into a different ADC - giving you (effectively) double the
samples per second.

Which brings me to another important feature which is the clocking.
To get a good representation of your incoming signal, you should have
a pretty good reference clock with a VCXO or VCTCXO - especially if
you want to do that high IF sampling.  Those signals are moving so
quick, you really need a super stable reference to nab them at the
right time, otherwise your aliased image has a bit more noise.

Yeah, that indeed is an important issue that needs a very detailed and
thought-out solution. One thing I'd like to be able to do some day is
have maybe three of these devices all 100 meters from my computer
arranged in a triangle and then triangulate signals using the Time of
Arrival principle. I might be able to eventually construct an antenna
array that isn't just directional, but also aware of distance. 65Msps
wouldn't be enough for useful resolution, but it's a start. :)

I would have to co-ordinate the receivers exactly to do this... Could
it be possible to supply a stable clock over Ethernet? Couple it to
the -48VDC? =)

If all you want to do is take the ADC data and shove it off to the PC
to process, you need a really small FPGA that has just a few block
rams in it to store for FIFOs.

If you wanted to do more signal processing within the FPGA, you should
look more towards a mid-sized low-end FPGA (Spartan 3E, Cyclone II,
Lattice Semi) with embedded multipliers.  An XC3S500E should run you
around $20 and have a good amount of resources in there to run your
gigE interface state machine and do some filtering - possibly an FFT
or two as well.

Learning Verilog should take a back seat to understanding your receive
chain and how you want to process your incoming signals.  Are you
going to try to really process everything on the host side of things,
or would you like different FPGA loads to be able to reduce down that
massive data exchange and process less on your host?

Parts are available for all different prices - but be sure to solve
your problem and not just put together something that has a kitchen
sink.  You had wanted an oscope / spectrum analyzer / SDR.  Is 500MHz
bandwidth good enough for you?  Do you want more?  Is 64MSPS the
digitizing rate you want to hit?  What range and resolution bandwidths
do you want for your spectrum analyzer?  0-10MHz at 1kHz RBW?

Listing out your requirements / wish list might be a good idea before
just saying you want to build this generic cheap SDR board.

I think that, realistically, I will have to do something with the data
already at the FPGA. Be it pre-processing or decimation I do not know
yet, nor can I guesstimate due to lack of experience. PA3FWM in the
link Henry posted managed to deal with 2.5Msps, but I don't know his
bit rate. I've decided in the past that I would be happy with being
able to see just 1MHz of bandwidth at the time, and PA3FWM seems to
have exceeded that. The benefit of using a high-speed ADC in this case
would not be voided, since we could still do a lot of mojo that one
can't do with a radio that requires a tuner. The lack of tuner in
itself makes the device cheaper too...

And what's "RBW"? =)

--
Nos




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