[hpsdr] An idea for a project

[Ken N9VV]

Hi Paul, you sure are on the right track. Some of the new DDC (Direct 
Down Conversion) receivers like the OpenHPSDR Mercury and the DUC 
(Direct Up Conversion) transmitters such as the PennyLane or Hermes 
transceiver are already being designed into beautiful self contained 
systems.

You mentioned the BeagleBoard. Did you see this SDR/Beagle project?
http://beagleboard.org/project/BeagleBrick/

there are many others such as the beautiful system designed by Alberto 
I2PHD and Giuliano I0CG: http://www.i0cg.com/sdr-x.htm
this system was demonstrated at the Italian Modena Hamfest in May of 
this year.

There are many others that I am sure you will enjoy learning about.

GL 73 de Ken N9VV
http://www.n9vv.com
-- 
"QSD and .NET have left the building"


On 12/26/2010 10:48 PM, KA5FPT Paul wrote:
> ***** High Performance Software Defined Radio Discussion List *****
>
> To the community,
> Recently while doing some searching on-line I came across the following
> bits of information, and this got me thinking of a project.
>
> First I came across the following while looking up some facts on the
> SDR-Cube -
> (http://www.eham.net/ehamforum/smf/index.php?action=printpage;topic=72022.0)
>
> The writer wrote:
> "This is a fantastic development. Finally someone who actually
> understands that building a ham radio transceiver on a PC platform is a
> stone age concept.
>
> This SDR Cube concept is the right one for the future. If Flexradio did
> the same thing their products would be a runaway success. Unfortunately
> the flex groupies like riding around on a horse and cart when hamming
> when they could be speeding around the track on a Ferrari using just
> such an embedded solution.
>
> An embedded control integrated control system for ham transceiver
> without the MS bloat ware and latency will be the final remake of the
> SDR concept for hams. This is the first company that has pulled this
> off. The first company that releases an embedded version of the Flex5000
> will be selling a very popular transceiver.
>
> Lets hope more companies come up with SDR products like the Cube
> Transceiver using high performance embedded hardware. Micro controllers
> are cheap readily available these days, there's absolutely no need to
> use a stone age PC and dinosaur MS bloatware. The folks behind SDR Cube
> are certainly smart forward thinking people, they certainly understand
> that the vast majority of hams like playing with knobs. A SDR box with
> knobs will have very wide market appeal. I wish them well, lets hope
> that they bring out a top of the range transceiver that blows everything
> away. A large color screen, 200 watt FET PA and all embedded hardware in
> one box will be a big hit. Maybe this company will wake Flexradio up
> from their drunken PC/Windoz stupor."
>
>
> Now I don't agree with all that the writer wrote, but I do understand
> the frustrations that do occur when using Microsoft Windows. Then while
> doing some research on the BeagleBoard I came across the link to a site
> called DesignSomething.org (http://designsomething.org/). A site "...
> designed to highlight open source software communities and projects that
> utilize Texas Instruments technology." Among the products was one called
> the Pandora (http://openpandora.org/). An open console hardware for
> gaming but powerful enough to be used for many other projects. I started
> wondering if this could be used for interfacing to the HPSDR. But I
> worried if it had enough power to handle the SDR processing.
>
> Then while sitting back thinking, with a good bottle of dark microbrew
> beer, I started to wonder. Why not off load the "SDR processing" from
> the PC to an external processor? Those who remember the earlier days of
> gaming knows that at one time all we had was the vga chip on the IBM
> motherboard. As games progressed and the need for more video processing
> was required, the "gpu" (graphical processor unit) came about. Of course
> that led to the video card industry, and in turn visually better quality
> games. The two went hand and hand each pushing the other. Well why not
> develop our own "SDR processing unit"? What I envision is that from the
> HPSDR Metis we could use the gigabit Ethernet to feed our "SDR
> processing unit", which would do all of the processing extracting the
> information from the I and Q streams. In turn the "SDR processing unit"
> would be connected to a PC, or any other human interface device such as
> the Pandora, to strictly do information processing. In other words to
> enter frequencies, modes, filters, etc. Since the "SDR processing unit"
> will only be handling SDR processing latency issues should then be
> eliminated.
>
> Of course there are probably a hundred issues and complications that I
> have not thought about such as audio and video processing. And I am sure
> not all will agree that this will make a good project. But what does
> everyone else think? Will moving the SDR processing from
> the PC (Windows, Apple, Linux, etc.) to a separate board help us or hurt
> us?
>
> Paul Cecil
> KA5FPT
>
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