VK4ZXI

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...

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.   ...