[hpsdr] New Hermes board

[ad0es]

Hi,

I guess its time for me to enter the peanut gallery:

Sell 2 variants of the board:

   1: bare board, bed-of-nail tested.
       This board would satisfy the hard-core DIY crowd.

   2: board with BGA FPGA installed, as well as all the large scale, 
dense pinout chips.
       meaning the FPGA, the ADC(s), DAC and possibly 1 or 2 more. If 
your bothering to
       set up the line, add  ALL the difficult parts.
       This would be ideal for those wishing to DIY it, but accepting 
the reality that these
       large-scale, dense pinout chips are better left to machines 
designed for the task.
       I've worked these sorts of projects commercially for the "big 
boys", and they don't
       even consider building/repairing this type of board by hand. If 
it doesn't work it
       goes into the trash (except for possible postmortem info, or 
salvaging very expensive parts)

Probably not in scope but a high speed bus such as pciE would be 
required if you want to do
DFC work with it.  1Gbit ethernet wont cut it.

Steve AD0ES

On 06/03/2017 12:43 PM, Steve Haynal wrote:
> ***** High Performance Software Defined Radio Discussion List *****
>
>
>
> Hi Glen,
>
> This is a receiver only. 14-bit. You can listen to many online at 
> http://sdr.hu
>
> I mention it in context of the Hermes transceiver redesign for these 
> reasons.
>
> It uses a relatively inexpensive Xilinx Artix7 BGA part. $35 for 35K 
> LEs. Earlier discussion on this thread recommended switching to BGA 
> even though it restricts access to home builders. Also, it was pointed 
> out that pin and interfacing specs are better for BGA and there are 
> fewer new nonBGA FPGAs available. With the Hermes-Lite 2 we went with 
> a Cyclone IV part in 144 EQFP package just so home builders would be 
> able to build one. We've learned that there is now too much SMT on the 
> Hermes-Lite 2 that only a few diehards will ever build one at home. I 
> anticipate that most Hermes-Lite 2s will be partially or completely 
> assembled in China. So in hindsight we could have considered a BGA 
> part for the Hermes-Lite 2, and I probably will in future projects.

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