David,
OK, I see what you're after now. Gnuradio isn't a SPICE simulator, so getting it to fully represent your Tayloe mixer isn't really feasible. Maybe the easiest way to accomplish what you're looking to do would be to quantify the performance of your LTSpice simulation in a model of a quadrature mixer that incorporates error parameters corresponding to your mixer's simulated performance. In other words, make a Gnuradio block which performs the job of the mixer, while adding the noise and nonlinearities observed in your model -- conversion loss, thermal noise, and IQ imbalance, for example. What you'd be missing is the end-to-end loop closure that lets you make changes to the SPICE model and evaluate them easily.
You could also use GR to construct a synthetic transmission, like you suggest, write it to disk, and convert it to a time series format that LTSpice can ingest. I know that LTSpice's RAW data format is documented, and it looks like there are a couple of Python packages which read and write it. Because you can run LTSpice in batch mode, it's conceivable that you could automate the whole process in Python -- generate a test signal, write it to RAW, run it through LTSpice in batch mode, convert the resulting RAW to a complex floating-point IQ signal Gnuradio can read, and process it to extract performance parameters in Gnuradio again. Supposedly there's also
a Python LTSpice integration that lets you do everything in Python, in which case you could make a Python GR block that would just execute LTSpice from within the block itself, in which case you could get really funky with parameter sweeps and such.
Sounds like a fun project! If you do write such an integration, please consider releasing it to the community as well.
Nick
I have built the detector in ltspice, but i was hoping to use gr to do a "soup to nuts" sim with multiple transmitters and various noise sources, feed that into the Tayloe, and then see what I could do downline from there to recover my signals.
On 2022-08-12 13:38, david vanhorn wrote:
> Ive been wrestling with this for a while, and im not even seeing how
> to get started implementing a Taylor detector in gr.
>
> Is it even possible?
You mean a *Tayloe* Quadrature Sampling Detector?
This is ordinarily a *hardware component* of certain types of HF
direct-conversion receivers.
Gnu Radio isn't, primarily, a hardware simulation environment, although
it is the case that many DSP transforms
have hardware analogues, it's not really a hardware simulator.
It's probably best to tell us what you actually want to achieve, because
unless it's really "simulate a Tayloe QSD",
it's unlikely that building a Tayloe QSD in Gnu Radio is really going
to be that useful...