[hpsdr] Project proposal - Hermes

Philip Covington p.covington at gmail.com
Wed Apr 15 16:58:11 PDT 2009


On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 2:36 PM, Graham / KE9H <KE9H at austin.rr.com> wrote:
> All:
>
> I would like to support Kevin's pursuit of Hermes as a derivative project.
>
> It may or may not advance the technical state of the art on hardware.
>
> There are a few things on Penny that can be improved and I have
> already informed Kevin of my thoughts. [I also copied the list,
> but my email was bounced back to me because the list was down.]
>
> I think we are approaching the point where the effort can shift more
> to the software side, and any platform that opens up and encourages
> OPEN software development for the underlying HPSDR architecture is a
> positive from my viewpoint.
>
> So far, software has been the long pole in the tent, and that pole
> has been supported by Bill, KD5TFD almost singlehandedly for
> PowerSDR extension, debug and modification to support the
> HPSDR hardware set [Thank you, Bill].
>
> I also thank the few people that have written the FPGA Verilog code.
> And this story is getting much better by the generous contribution
> by Kirk, KD7IRS by teaching, recording and psoting over a dozen classes
> on Verilog programming, and functional content and flow of the
> Merc/Penny/Ozy FPGA code.  [Thank you, Kirk] And Kirk has also rewritten a
> lot of the code, in a
> progressive effort to clean up issues in the FPGA and Bus areas.
>
> The three projects that I have worked on, really have not advanced
> the state of the art as much as they have enabled the core HPSDR
> cards to become usable in a more complete system application.
>
> I think Kevin's Hermes proposal falls in this category.  It removes
> a whole bunch of things that were put into Mercury, Penny, and
> Ozy, just in case, for development testing, or experimental purposes
> that sometimes didn't work out, or future universality, or ... .
>
> Hermes could be a major cost and size reduction for the system level
> platform of an SDR HF/transverter transceiver. Which also has value.
>
> Filling out the system level hardware, either as I have helped do, or
> in a more compact bus-less form factor will provide a reasonably
> common and attractive platform for software development.
>
> Once we get the hardware systems limitations out of the way,
> I think more of the software types that perhaps don't have the
> hardware development skills will come and play with us.
>
> After all, this is a software defined radio, and it is time to
> enable and encourage and feed the software development.
>
> I will know I am right when I see the first proposal for a
> software-only HPSDR project.  Perhaps a remote base
> HPSDR, or a multi-user shared base HPSDR, or a software-only
> addition converting HPSDR to test equipment apart from
> PowerSDR or what ever smarter and younger people than me
> can think of.
>
> --- Graham / KE9H
>
> ==

On second thought, not restricting projects to something that can go
on the Atlas bus or attach to a board on the Atlas bus potentially can
open up a lot of new possibilities for hardware.  I agree that a big
problem is lack of software projects.

Phil N8VB

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