VK4ZXI

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...

Red Pitaya: arrived and working My Red Pitaya has arrived and was working with a minimum of fuss. Simply type in the device's unique MAC address on the connect page http://discovery.redpitaya.com/  and hit connect. The instrument functions are web applications. Just click which instrument you want and it comes up in a web page. I was curious how they could get it to work on any computer, tablet or operating system, but the web access is the answer. I am not sure what consequences that has for performance, but it works and it is still early days. The Red Pipaya connected to give some idea of size. It gets pretty hot, maybe too hot for a warm climate like northern Australia; we shall see. The device is working as an oscilloscope and signal generator, with an output connected to an input. A sine wave at 20 MHz. Many of the adjustments are manual and take a bit of getting used to. However, it works. Not the cleanest sine wave; not sure if it is the signal generator or os...

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...