[hpsdr] single board rigs *YES* please...

[Phil Harman]

Quoting Ken N9VV <n9vv at wowway.com>:

>
> The AOJPxyz kits are just way beyond the capabilities of many of
> us plain-vanilla hams. I am afraid many of us are afraid that the
> TAPR boards might be exotic engineering trophies rather than
> practical workable ham rigs. A new design might go a long way to
> strengthen the SDR future.
>
> de ken n9vv

I like to try and allay Ken's concerns regarding the TAPR boards. As 
others have stated the goal of HPSDR is to build high performance SDR 
components. Building this in a modular fashion, to evaluate the latest 
and greatest new device,  allows us to replace perhaps a single board 
in the future without the need to scrap an entire radio.

I think so far we are meeting that goal, those using Janus as their 
'sound card' generally seem very pleased with the performance. As an 
experimenter this is an ideal development platform, for example this 
weekend I was able to make a small adapter board so I could connect an 
LT2208 evaluation board to Ozy. With this board, Penelope and an second 
Ozy on the Atlas bus I have a complete (QRP) digital HF transceiver. 
Yes, I could have laid out a new PCB and done it more conventionally 
but this approach took less than 1/2 hour from the idea to getting it 
working.

Is this the correct approach to build an SDR for the non-experimenter - 
I suspect not - a single board approach would be much more attractive. 
This does not imply that we won't end up with a full functional and 
practical rig (with great performance!) but 'some assembly will be 
required'.

As Lyle says, with what we have learnt from building the current range 
of HPSDR boards we could design a very impressive single board SDR. I 
for one hope we do this in the short term.

Now for a dose of reality. When I built my test board this weekend I 
based the FPGA code on the Mercury code that I had already written 
previously. I was disappointed to see that the date on this code was  
September 2006 - 12 months ago!  With sufficient volunteers we could 
have had Mercury Mk II by now!

So, if we can't even get enough volunteers to develop the existing 
ideas to the stage were we can use the circuits and knowledge for 
future projects where are the volunteers to build the single board 
version?

73's Phil....VK6APH


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