VK4ZXI

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.   ...

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 ...