[hpsdr] Orion MKII board - Hermes board

[Scott Traurig]

Georg,

There has been a progression of SDR boards since Hermes. Next there was the
Angelia, then the Orion, then the Orion MKII.

They are all essentially the same architecture with minor but significant
changes.

The largest difference is that all of the successor designs have a second
ADC channel available that is phase locked to the first ADC. Both PowerSDR
and Thetis clients support coherent beamforming using this feature (labeled
"diversity" in the software).

The Orion and Orion MKII share the same but much larger FPGA and increased
on-board memory. They also boast improved phase noise and clock stability
compared to the Hermes resulting in improved IMD on transmit and improved
RMDR on receive. Both boards also include an on-board coupler and switching
for improved linearization performance with the PureSignal linearization
processing built into PowerSDR and Thetis.

The Orion MKII has a few tweaks that give it a slight edge over the Orion.
In particular the ADC preamp has been changed to a 14dB gain part instead
of the 20dB part used on predecessor boards. And the RF output level is now
controlled by a combination of step attenuator (1dB steps) and the DAC
reference voltage (fractional dB steps) instead of only using the DAC
reference voltage. Also, the Orion MKII firmware allows control via SPI for
a second set of preselectors on ADC2.

That's it in a nutshell.

You will find a lot more current news and information here:
https://apache-labs.com/community/index.php

73,

Scott/w-u-2-o


The Orion MKII
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