RE: FW: [Discuss-gnuradio] MicroTune Tuners

[Brian_Whitaker]

Paul,

  I agree with you. I'd mentioned before that I'm exploring the use of a
very highly integrated satellite receiver (Maxim's max2116 or 2118) for
this. Maxim has an EVkit developed for this, and I've asked the business
manager of this product line whether he'd be interested in selling to
members of this project. I'll post back when I have an answer, but its
likely that he'll choose not to spend evkit resources on building/testing
one-offs for a group of hobbyists. I'll work on him a little on this.

  Otherwise, I could probably get the GERBER files, BOM, etc. and _someone_
could pay a board house to do a run themselves. Since I'm here at Maxim, I'd
probably just pay the same house that has been doing it to do another run --
but that would put me in the same position as you, where I'd end up with
10-20 boards in hand at my own cost.  I'm not yet willing to take this on...

  I will, however, get my hands on a single EVKit and start playing with it
in lab. Matt Ettus has plans for the hardware from the ADC back -- and I
plan on helping him incorporate this (or another) tuner on his board. I'd
also be very happy to do what I can to help you integrate a receiver into
your project.

  Once we get a couple of prototypes running, and we know that the tuner
works well, I'd be willing to have a few boards made -- and I'd test them
myself, and re-sell them to the group, assuming that mgt here wouldn't
object to it.

  Back to Microtune's canned solution -- there's got to be someone out there
that stocks these -- DigiKey? BlackBox? some evil broker?

Brian.