VK4ZXI

Achieving 4K UHD DATV- very draft Perhaps a little early, but 4K DATV may be more achievable than I first thought. It would be a bit of a technological coup if amateur radio can do 4K before regular free-to-air broadcast TV. 4K video cameras and monitors are already relatively inexpensive. 4K TV capture/switchers are available and not too expensive. The missing link are modulators, transmitters and receivers, but may be possible using inexpensive SDR TRX; they can already do DVB-T/S. As far as I am aware, broadcast TV is still struggling with Full HD digital TV in some countries, notably the USA with a very large number of small TV stations and the not insignificant cost of having to replace virtually everything, other than their antenna. I suspect the same across some of Europe and Asia. For both terrestrial and satellite, while they may have digital TV, most of it is SD (standard definition) or HD (high definition 720p), rather than wide-screen Full HD (1080i; wish it was 1080p...

My journey in DATV and the future: 4K UHD or internet-linked DATV repeaters; Not that crazy? Draft In this post I want to briefly outline my DATV journey and a quest for Full HD DVB-T. I have achieved this in a relatively short time and out of some of my difficulties, have wondered if first, 4K UHD DATV and, second, network-linked DATV repeaters, are possibly not that distant. In this post I will outline my journey, as the future is path dependent, history matters! In the following two posts I will consider ways to achieve 4K UHD and internet-linked DATV repeaters. My DATV journey: Live Full HD DVB-T Personally, coming late to DATV at the beginning of 2013, with a 40 year break in my amateur radio activities (see my first post), I have not had to put in the extreme effort and expense of either analogue TV or digital TV, particularly over the last decade, such as by the DATV Express team, among many others. Before returning to amateur radio I had spent considerable time and...

BladeRF XB-200 transverter working with SDR# on Windows Software to support the BladeRF XB-200 transverter is beginning to emerge, however, the information is spread across a number of sources. In this post I have amalgamated the various bits of information to get the devices working on Windows 8.1. Connecting the cables It is not entirely obvious how the various connectors are used. The information is provided in the BladeRF GitHub:   https://github.com/Nuand/bladeRF/wiki/Getting-Started:-XB200-Transverter-Board For RX only: RXFILT-ANT to RXFILT to bridge "custom" filter. RXIF on transverter to BladeRF RX to connect transverter to BladeRF. Connect antenna to transverter RXANT for use with VHF and above. Connect HF antenna to ADC (be careful, see earlier post- http://vk4zxi.blogspot.com.au/2014/03/bladerf-transverter-and-hf-trx-its-been.html ). Windows SDR# software for BladeRF  SDR# software to support the BladeRF and Transverter is av...

HiDes HV-202E DVB-T self-contained transmitter: Quality all digital live DATV from DSLR camera at last! The HiDes HV-102E DVB-T self-contained transmitter has arrived at US$660 delivered. I ordered the USB version of this professional HDMI/HD-SDI 4 band (100 MHz - 2.5GHz) DVB-T TX originally, but upgraded to the stand-alone box instead. (see why latter). It works perfectly out of the box and is easily configurable for any modulation or media parameters. I had a good experience with the HiDes DVB-T HD CCTV camera transmitter; see earlier post. As such I thought I would try their HDMI input DVB-T TX. Surprising similar, as will be explained. The impressive specifications per HiDes: There isn't much this box can't do! Any frequency (up to 2.5 GHz!), any band-width, any media modulation parameter. There isn't anything that comes close, at any cost. I set it up on a channel my little 16" TV could receive (by cable with an attenuator) and connected...

BladeRF, the XB-200 transverter and HF TRX; it's been there all the time! The BladeRF and now its XB-200 transverter are very neat pieces of gear. Now the big "but" or "however". Many people have been wanting to use the BladeRF on HF and were waiting for the transverter to be delivered in anticipation of it covering HF. However, the original range of the transverter was 30 to 300 MHz, with no apparent coverage. When the final design and photos were released, coverage was 60 kHz to 300 MHz, which no doubt pleased many people. I went though the schematics trying to find the modifications to cover HF, but they were not apparent, a point I raised in the Nuand forum. I received a reply from Nuand to say that the HF access was not very obvious and went to the ADC/DAC. This mystified me for a few days until it finally clicked on how HF is done, which is exactly what they way they said. However HF TRX is virtually independent of the transverter and could have been...

Windows 8/Windows 8.1 procedure for unsigned drivers and problems with antivirus There are a couple of problems with "new" software when using Windows 8 or 8.1, not specific to BladeRF, SDR-Console V2, or UT-100C DVB-T dongle betas. My comments are not a criticism of Windows 8, it is a vast improvement on Windows 7 and a necessary path for creating an ecosystem operating system where a common user interface is available on all devices, be they PCs, laptops, tablets or phones. This is necessary for the central administration of all devices in an enterprise setting. In any case, I prefer the Windows 8 interface and access programs in the start tiles system. Windows Explorer has been re-written and is much better. The first issue is that Windows 8 won't install unsigned drivers or even tell you that it hasn't. Given security issues, that is not such a bad thing, but I wish Windows 8 would at least tell you of the problem (as Windows 7 does) when installing drive...

I occasionally troll through the "Kickstarter" projects for interesting ones, with both BladeRF and HackRF having their funding from there. http://www.kickstarter.com/ Some weeks ago I came across the "Red Pitaya" http://www.redpitaya.com/ . It seemed like "manna from heaven", a software-defined instrumentation system. Just what I wanted, not having the deep pockets needed for serious HF test gear. I thought I had missed out on the first run, but was down for a subsequent one. However, I received a quote last night, that I immediately accepted. They are due to be shipped February 24, that's only about 45 sleeps... plus shipping time from Slovenia (Eastern Europe is booming, we don't hear much about it here (Australia). I will try and write it up on my other blog on multilevel change) These are the objectives: "INITIAL SET OF OUT-OF-THE-BOX INSTRUMENTS   OSCILLOSCOPE: 2 channels @ 125 MS/s 14 bit digital with external or signal ba...

Satellite TV, RX and positioning Playing with satellites TV or radio is not too hard or expensive. I did a fair bit on it a few years ago (C and K band, ~4 GHz and ~12 GHz) and still have some of the gear. I could see my house in Brisbane on Google maps from the big white C band dish, ex Sky. It was a heavy fixed dish, jerry-rigged with a linear-actuator for position control.   A full new C (and usable on K) band system is around $400 on eBay.   Sometimes they are available for free, migrants and expats used them to get overseas TV. I had one, disassembled, but tossed it when we moved to Gold Coast. Should/may have kept pole, as big steel is expensive. All satellite TV use a LNB (low noise block) to receive and down convert to a standard IF range of about 1 to 2 GHz for a TV set-top box. The coax is used to carry control signals as tones (diseqc) or DC. The coax is very high performance, but cheap because of the massive use of it. The big dishes are controlled...

BladeRF on Haswell i5 running Windows 8 with SDR-Console at 935 MHz 20 MHz bandwidth Screen shot of BladeRF running on Windows 8 with i5 Haswell processor. The BladeRF windows installer uses an unsigned driver. With the extra security of Windows 8 it will not normally even give you the option of installing unsigned drivers, Windows 7 does. However Windows 8 has a special restart where the unsigned driver block can be disabled. I think I described it in earlier blogs. Using the earlier beta of SDR-console V2 per earlier blogs, the bandwidth is 20 MHz rather than 30. I think the narrower bandwidth is more appropriate re Nyquist, about half the 38.5 MHz bandwidth of the BladeRF. At 20 MHz, the CPU is barely busy at about 4 % versus 10 times that of screen shots at 30 MHz in earlier blogs. Simon Brown, the author of SDR-Console said in his Yahoo forum that the FFT runs at 30 MHz too. Dropping the bandwidth to 20 MHz seems to calm everything down.   ...

BladeRF receiving DVB-T test transmission from VK4ZXI 1mW at 2 m from UT-100C DVB-T usb TX Well, it works. UT-100C USB DVB-T TX transmission from my laptop being received by BladeRF on 70 cm channel. Not a bad signal with few spurious. Amplifiers will have low pass filter. Now to do the amplifiers and antenna.

BladeRF with SDR-Console- Sceenshots (draft) Just a quick post of some screen shots of the brilliant BladeRF running on the equally impressive SDR-Console by Simon Brown to show cababilities of both and the noy-surprising heavy load on an i5 2500K processor. Free to air TV channel, 7 MHz wide with BladeRF running 30 MHz bandwidth Same signal but one edge with 150 kHz bandwidth to show detail     Machine performance with 30 MHz bandwidth, CPU @ 67 C and fan whizzing. Ran like this for 20 hours, so all quite stable.       CPU load with some interesting signals. Reported stuttering is probably not a fast enough CPU. 30 MHz at 12 bit resolution would push anything.      Plan to try it on Windows 8 machine. Reported problems may be due to Windows  8 not accepting (or telling you) unsigned drivers. Such can be loaded in special restart mode.

Summary of BladeRF SDR TRX BladeRF is a high performance SDR transceiver made by a small start-up company, Nuand http://www.nuand.com/bladeRF . Currently only mainboard is available for US$420, with a HF/VHF transverter due late November to give coverage down to 10 MHz. For receive only, an up-converter for RTL-SDR dongles could be used to go lower. Technical Specifications: •Fully bus-powered USB 3.0 SuperSpeed Software Defined Radio •Portable, handheld form factor: 5" by 3.5" •Extensible gold plated RF SMA connectors •300MHz - 3.8GHz RF frequency range •Independent RX/TX 12-bit 40MSPS quadrature sampling:  LMS6002D is a field programmable RF  transceiver http://www.limemicro.com/products/LMS6002D.php     •Capable of achieving full-duplex 28MHz channels •16-bit DAC factory calibrated 38.4MHz +/-1ppm VCTCXO •On-board 200MHz ARM9 SOC with ...