Developers Disclose Schematics For 50-1000 MHz Software-Defined Transceiver 135
Bruce Perens writes Chris Testa KD2BMH and I have been working for years on a software-defined transceiver that would be FCC-legal and could communicate using essentially any mode and protocol up to 1 MHz wide on frequencies between 50 and 1000 MHz. It's been discussed here before, most recently when Chris taught gate-array programming in Python. We are about to submit the third generation of the design for PCB fabrication, and hope that this version will be salable as a "developer board" and later as a packaged walkie-talkie, mobile, and base station. This radio is unique in that it uses your smartphone for the GUI, uses apps to provide communication modes, contains an on-board FLASH-based gate-array and a ucLinux system. We intend to go for FSF "Respects Your Freedom" certification for the device. My slide show contains 20 pages of schematics and is full of ham jargon ("HT" means "handi-talkie", an old Motorola product name and the hams word for "walkie talkie") but many non-hams should be able to parse it with some help from search engines. Bruce Perens K6BP
HT? (Score:1)
I've always known HT to be "handheld transceiver", none of this "handie-talkie" nonsense.
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I think HT actually came from Motorola's designation for their hand-held transceivers, e.g. HT-100. And "Handie-Talkie" is the term that Motorola used, check old product literature.
Motorola trademarked the term (in different forms) in 1948 and 1960.
http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/... [uspto.gov]
50 Mhz lower limit? Ouch. (Score:5, Informative)
Most hams (including myself) are interested in HF (and others are interested in SWL and the new below-AM BCB ham frequencies.)
50 MHz means 6 meters and above -- basically, nothing that has any regularly occurring usable propagation modes. Many of these upper bands are almost dead -- I've not heard anyone on 2 meters or 70 cm around here in the last year -- but 10 through 160 meters (28 MHz through 1.8 MHz) are busy as heck, and of course all the SW spectrum in between.
Worse, we're almost certain to be about to slide down the sunspot curve [noaa.gov], making the already mostly dead-by-choice bands completely dead-by-nature, propagation-wise.
RFSPACE's upcoming new unit is .009 (9khz) through 50 MHz. That's a lot more attractive to me. Both to use, and to support.
Then there's funcube dongle pro plus... 50 khz through 1.8 GHz, albeit without adequate filtering up front. But it's reasonably cheap, so there's that. (and I already supported it, PITA though it was, so it's not subject to the no-more-USB-devices rule.)
Well, whatever they end up with, I sure hope it's ethernet-connected and uses the standard SDR protocol as do Andrus, AFEDRI and RFSPACE. I've supported my last black sheep USB device (every darned OS has radically different USB interfacing and requirements... building my free cross-platform SDR software [fyngyrz.com] is most tricky with regard to USB issues. Ethernet, by comparison, is almost identical on all platforms -- the same SDR protocol / interfacing code works fine across linux, Windows and OS X.)
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Ummmm I'm not so sure you can say most hams are HF focused. I think there are a lot more technician class shack-on-a-belt types than hard core HF types. Although, the shack-on-a-belt ham isn't likely to be an experimenter. Then again, the CW-or-die HF crowd isn't really doing bleeding edge experiments either. It seems to me that 50-1000 MHz scores a bulls-eye on most true experimenters.
In any case, there already a zillion options in HF SDR's -- how many are you running now? Personally, I'm annoyed that
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Most hams (including myself) are interested in HF (and others are interested in SWL and the new below-AM BCB ham frequencies.)
50 MHz means 6 meters and above -- basically, nothing that has any regularly occurring usable propagation modes. Many of these upper bands are almost dead -- I've not heard anyone on 2 meters or 70 cm around here in the last year -- but 10 through 160 meters (28 MHz through 1.8 MHz) are busy as heck, and of course all the SW spectrum in between.
What's the point of a fancy SDR on the lower bands though? At least in the States most of the amateur bands with any kind of useful propagation are so narrow that one of the brain dead simple sound card SDR rigs can cover the majority of your band of choice. 200kHz on 160, 500kHz on 80, five narrow channels on 60, etc. One of the simple sound card based "ghetto SDR" rigs gets you enough TX bandwidth to monopolize a good part of the band. Since transmitting even that wide of a signal would be generally f
Re:50 Mhz lower limit? Ouch. (Score:4, Interesting)
This is going to be long-winded; there's quite a bit to cover. Sorry. :)
Cover, yes. Cover well, no. You need lots of bit depth for adequate dynamic range without filters, bit depth almost no one offers, and if you don't have adequate bit depth, then you really need front end filtering and probably a stepped attenuator as well. You need EM protection because HF antennas tend to be large and prone to large induced voltages. You need good frequency linearity if you want to use the SDR to get accurate measurements (even the s-meter.) For the ham bands, it's also nice if the SDR supports a sample rate of 400 khz or better, which is tough for a sound card SDR. Then there is frequency accuracy and stability, not to mention external reference sources (there all kinds of cool things you can do with a very stable SDR, like this AM graveyard band carrier forest [flickr.com]), and then we get into multiple front ends for diversity reception and noise reduction. If you want to remote the SDR for any reason, you really need ethernet, and if you need ethernet, you need some smarts. And you need ethernet anyway, because USB bloody sucks (speaking as a cross-platform developer.) So If you want a good SDR, you just don't end up with a "brain dead simple" SDR.
As to narrow ham bands in the HF range, well, not really. 160 meters is 200 kHz. 80 meters is 500 kHz. 20 meters is 350 KHz. 15 meters is 450 kHz. 10 meters is 1.7 MHz. The WARC bands are all pretty tiny. Also, for SWL, some of those are quite wide, and even more so if you include the out of band regions where the pirates are. Pirates being quite unpredictable, you want them in the spectrum so you can see them when they pop up, so bandwidth is quite relevant if they are of interest (personally, I find them fascinating.) Come to that, if you want to see what overall prop/activity is looking like, you need 30 MHz of bandwidth to do it live.
I will grant you that someday, we may be able to put a 48 bit, multiple Gs/s A/D on a chip with a full ethernet interface cheap enough for anyone to own; but not right now. Until that day, good SDRs will not be "brain dead simple."
More on frequency range: If you want to use the SDR for a panadaptor for an existing receiver (very common use), then it has to cover one of the IF frequencies and associated bandwidth of the receiver, which tends to be in the HF range (not always, though.) Then there are cray-cray folk like myself; among other things, I use my SDR to monitor bats in our attic. To do that, the SDR has to be able to do a good job with the first 100 KHz, also true of experimentation with sonar and other audio ranging and detecting tech.
I'm not saying there isn't stuff up higher than HF; of course there is. Some of the really cool stuff (wifi, for instance) is as high as 5 GHz. Satellites, public utilities, etc. Any motion video needs to be up pretty high (but it also needs very significant bandwidth.) But HF has a huge amount of interest, it's where most hams actually hang out, and as it's a very challenging reception environment, higher end designs are of great interest. So are hackable designs one can get at. For instance, if you built yourself a multi-stage filter bank for the various HF bands, you could have them switch automatically as you tune. Likewise you could control add-on attenuators, RF preamps, and switchable transverters (which can give a nominally lower freq range SDR excellent access to higher bands.)
I have a variety of SDRs, and switching is simply a matter of prodding a menu. I have access from about 1 Hz to 3 GHz across the group, with varying features as described above. In the end,
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I have the utmost respect for the Sport of Ham radio on HF; but I built this device with a different intention in mind vs competing for DXpedition mind-share. VHF/UHF radios are the workhorse of modern communication, and my goal is to experiment with what you can do there. The possibilities are very different between 6m, 2m, 70cm, and 23cm (for instance). Transverters with a HF SDR are a viable option, but not for your pocket, yet.
To answer your question about connectivity, the device has 10/100 Ethernet
SDR details and support (Score:3)
That's excellent. Did you build your own protocol, or did you use the mechanism RFSPACE, Andrus, AFEDRI and the various USB-to-Ethernet servers have established?
I try -- hard -- to support all ethernet based SDRs for which I can obtain protocol information.
Sound card I/Q is no problem for SdrDx --
Useful propogation over 50MHz (Score:3, Informative)
50 MHz means 6 meters and above -- basically, nothing that has any regularly occurring usable propagation modes.
Moon-bounce and ham-sats occur regularly enough to be useful. Granted, hamsat passes are so short-duration and so sought-after that they aren't useful for much more than bragging rights, and moon-bounce is too technically challenging to be useful for routine communications, but they are there.
RF-based repeater networks on the 2m (~146MHz) and 70cm (~440MHz) bands are common in the United States. They offer communications over hundreds of miles without using anything but the airwaves. Ditto some mountaint
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For local communications 2 meters is hard to beat. Sure decent hf rigs/antennas can speak to the world. But sometimes you only want to speak to your neighbours (like a local radio club).
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Fair 'nuff, there are many hams out there who've been in the game much longer than I have.
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Sadly, HT has been used publicly as 'handy talkie'. Going back a century or two - when I was in television broadcasting we had the new and 'phenomenal' Electronic News Gathering, or ENG revolution - which meant our reporters were bringing back videotape instead of undeveloped color film. We retired our film processor and installed edit bays. Ikegami - a Japanese camera manufacturer of some repute, marketed the HL-79 camera. HL? Turns out the Japanese (in this case) were doing their research on us Ameri
Bruce, finally something worth while (Score:1)
Bruce, finally something worth while. I've been reading since the beginning and this is cool. thanks for the contribution. Now more than ever.
Re:Bruce, finally something worth while (Score:5, Interesting)
My pleasure. We have a lot of fun with this stuff, and I'll continue to try to stretch the envelope for as long as I can. Chris and I have talked about doing an open-bitstream gate-array after this project.
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Been digging around... this would make a pretty damn fine cross band repeater!
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Actually it makes a good TDMA repeater. That means that it can receive and transmit on the same frequency, in different time slots. And it can carry full-duplex that way too.
It won't cross-band on its own. The I/Q transceiver chip won't transmit and receive simultaneously, and there's only one VFO.
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No no, I know, you would need 2 units, but they could be housed in the same case.
Usually, you need a separate TX/RX antennae, with enough physical separation to keep them from interfering, assuming standard .5 +/- offsets.
Cross band eliminates the interference so long as you didn't pick a harmonic and allows you to mount the antennae near to each other.
And they can be ad hoc, not worrying about having a repeater frequency license. (Totally full where I am)
No idea if TDMA solves any of the issues above with
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TDMA is time-division multiple access. It just means dividing the channel into time-slots, where each is some number of milliseconds. So, say we had two slots, each 20 ms long. We could receive for 20 ms, and then re-transmit what we received in the next 20 ms. No duplexers, no front-end overload, just one frequency. Works really well with digital modems and voice codecs.
Ground Penetrating Radar potential (Score:2)
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There was a TAPR paper a year ago from guys who did chirp-mode radar on HF and plotted the entire surface of the earth via ionosphere skip. OK, it was low resolution, but very impressive.
Yes. SDRs have been used for NMR, CAT, and radar besides the usual communication stuff. One of the issues is whether they will turn from transmit to receive fast enough. If not, you might need two, or one of those cheap stick receivers and a converter.
Re: Ground Penetrating Radar potential (Score:2)
One of the issues is whether they will turn from transmit to receive fast enough. If not, you might need two, or one of those cheap stick receivers and a converter.
Is there some standard way to manage timing? Does the weekend hacker need to deal with signal/buffer latency from the DAC/ADC or somehow manage timecode synchronization?
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The DAC and ADC are clocked by the master 10 MHz oscillator, and there's a gate-array that you can program all sorts of hardware timing into. But if you are actually dealing with radar I would expect that you've already joined this mailing list [leapsecond.com].
Sounds pretty awesome... (Score:2)
This sounds like a pretty cool system to play around with. Do you need a HAM license? I assume you can use it sans smartphone?
Re:Sounds pretty awesome... (Score:5, Informative)
It would be possible to use it in a short-range transmit mode or as a receiver without a ham license. That said, I spend several years of my life helping to get rid of the Morse Code test for radio hams, so that smart folks like you could just take technical tests to get the license. They aren't that difficult. It might be worth your time.
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It would be possible to use it in a short-range transmit mode or as a receiver without a ham license.
So this will be low enough powered to be certificated as a Part 15 device? And it won't have trivially modifiable software to violate the Part 15 standards so that everyone and their brother can have a cheap, unlicensed high-power (>Part 15 limits) source of interference to all the other licensed users?
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The first version is marketed as test equipment. Which gets us around the various type-acceptance issues. The second version is focused on end-users rather than developers and will be type-certified for either Amateur or one of the land-mobile bands.
Re:Sounds pretty awesome... (Score:5, Informative)
The first version is marketed as test equipment. Which gets us around the various type-acceptance issues.
Nobody will be able to use this in the ham bands without a ham license, or in the LMR without the appropriate licenses. At least not as a transmitter. It is a really bad idea to suggest to people that they can use a transceiver without the appropriate license. That's why we have license-free CB -- so many people got the idea they didn't need a license for a radio they bought from K-Mart that the FCC had to give up on requiring licenses.
The second version is focused on end-users rather than developers and will be type-certified for either Amateur or one of the land-mobile bands.
It should be LMR, since amateur typing won't make use on commercial frequencies legal. Since it's open source software, you will have a hard time claiming that the radio is limited to any specific bands or uses.
You talk in your slides about how the "big 3" will sell you something and they don't interoperate in digital mode. Yes, that's a problem. (And I, too, wonder what Yaesu was thinking with their C4FM radios.) Your solution is this system. So, you'll need apps that do all the existing digital modes. As soon as someone modifies one of them and starts passing their nifty new app around, you'll have the same interop problem. Even worse -- instead of three main manufacturers to keep track of, there will be potentially hundreds of amateur tinkerers creating new "not-modes" digital ops. Saying the amateur community should come up with the digital standards is like saying a herd of cats should guard the catnip. Herding cats, herding amateurs ...
You're going to need a master contacts-app that keeps track of who you talk to and what app you need and even then you'll need to know which app they're using at the moment.
Don't get me wrong. It's an interesting piece of hardware. It's just the idea of saying "without a license" that needs to be controlled. Handing a transceiver to someone that can cover 50-1000 MHz (even at just 2W) and suggesting that they don't need a license to use it, well, I dunno. I think that's dangerous for the future of ham radio, not beneficial.
By the way, you say that "the AMBE 1000 IP will be unenforceable after Hamvention" (or something like that. ) What does Hamvention have to do with it?
Unlike copyrights, patents expire. (Score:2)
What does Hamvention have to do with it?
It depends on when AMBE was introduced. Patents on math expire on the twentieth anniversary of filing.
Re:Unlike copyrights, patents expire. (Score:4, Interesting)
The first-use-in-commerce date is actually earlier than the date on the patents. Thus, the patent would not be expired, but could no longer be enforced.
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I did not mean to imply that anyone should do anything at all that they aren't legally allowed to do. Type-approval is about FCC requirements for the device, rather than the licensee. Land-mobile licenses just take money and ham licenses are easy enough to get that the regularly-abled don't really have an excuse not to get one. And one can also get the FCC Part 5 Experimental license.
Aston
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I'm currently assembling a Softrock Ensemble receiver just to play with SDR. I'm starting to become interested in more than passive receiving â" but a major part of my curiousity is about Morse, not voice. I can talk to anybody over the net after all, while Morse code communication feels like a very different kind of thing.
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I'm all for using Morse on the air. Just not on the test. I did specify a paddle input for this device.
Many are leaving ham radio too (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, many "smart folks like us" obtained amateur radio licenses only to leave the hobby in dismay after a decade or two. Hitting one's head against restrictive regulations just became too painful, especially the disallowing of encryption and content restrictions on carrying Internet traffic.
Until a few decades ago, an amateur license
Re:Many are leaving ham radio too (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, I led the fight to continue to disallow encryption on the Amateur bands just last year. I evangelized a lot of people to comment in opposition, and even dragged a reluctant ARRL into commenting when their original intent was not to do so. You'll notice that I am cited in the FCC ruling [fcc.gov]. It was only proposed to allow it for emergency communications, anyway.
You already have many different radio services where encryption is allowed. The shared, self-regulating nature of Amateur Radio makes encryption a disaster, as does the international nature. You can't self-regulate when you can't understand their communications. Nobody wants to see dxpeditions and HF communicators in general treated as spies by various nations, more than they already are.
We're perfectly happy with how useful Amateur Radio is, and it is not denial. Use the Internet and other services when you need encryption.
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Yes it is willful denial, and even worse, it is accompanied by an astounding attempt at rationalization of that denial with the most illogical and vacuous of excuses.
The many virtues of (digital) amateur radio would still be available if there were no visibility of the content that it transports at all. You can regulate encrypted communications perfectly well, because the thing that is licensed and which needs to be regulated is spectrum utilization in terms of power and bandwidth, not the nature of the co
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Actually the nature of the content does have relevance. It absolutely must not be commercial. Now, give me a way to regulate that when I can't break the encryption.
And if you are about to tell me that you should be allowed to do commercial stuff on Amateur Radio, you won't gain any sympathy. That's what your cell phone and a dozen other radio services are for. This was never meant for you to check your gmail, etc.
I think you should assume that your desires were simply incompatible with the service, and that
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That's easy. If the content is commercial, the cryptographic keys must be either sold or published at some time. Otherwise there wouldn't be any money in there.
Cryptographic keys (Score:2)
I am afraid that's not the way it works. Public-key encryption doesn't really give you the capability to decode the communication of two other parties unless you get the secret (rather than public) key, which they have no reason to give you. There is also a session key that is randomly generated and lives only for the duration of the connection, and there is the potential for VPNs or tunneling that further obscure the actual communication. It's actually very difficult for a monitoring station to even get 10
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In fact, I didn't think about peer to peer communications, just broadcasting.
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Yes. The usual mechanism here would be WiFi security, with HTTPS or SSL inside of it.
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The internet really sucks and we don't want another one on ham radio. Nor could we possibly have the bandwidth to support one. The entire HF spectrum fits in just a few WiFi channels.
To satisfy the demands of the "it should be anything goes" crowd, we have CB radio. And there are all of the common carriers, etc.
So, I can't sympathize, and even if I did, there are not the technical resources there.
Sorry.
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If you want that nearly infinite microwave spectrum, you have the Part 15 and ISM services. Absolutely nothing is stopping you. Power is not the issue with those frequencies, it's line of sight and Fresnel zones.
No, I absolutely do not have to prefix my words with anything. You do that by posting as an anonymous coward. I use my real name to indicate that I stand behind my words.
Re: Many are leaving ham radio too (Score:2)
Yep, that's the problem - Encryption and / or allowing "useful" content would quickly lead to the kind of "spectral" issues you are concerned with. Though a nice compromise might be to allow such things in certain bands only.
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That is why there are different radio services. Hams really only have a few corners here and there of the radio spectrum. There really is a service for everyone, although you should be aware that the entire HF spectrum would fit in a few WiFi channels, and all of the Amateur HF spectrum would fit in one. So, we don't really have the bandwidth at all. And people who want the bandwidth on UHF already have WiFi and the various sorts o
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I was thinking more along the lines of something in the UHF or microwave bands which would allow me to run relatively long distance encrypted data links, for internet link or remote control, but yeah, I guess these days you can just get a bunch of high-powered Chinese WiFi equipment and do it anyway.
It might be interesting, however, to "incentivize" use of some portion of certain underused VHF or HF bands by loosening up restrictions. At least the "idiots" might be useful beacons! Or are all the bands fu
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You have the Part 15 and ISM services for that. You really can buy a microwave link that's metropolitan-distance and legal to use.
We lost much of our 440 capability to PAVE PAWS in California. Remember, Amateur Radio is not the primary service on many bands. The military is on 440.
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Except that you're wrong. Amateur radio licenses are at an all-time high. The last two years saw an increase of 13% and 15%. That's huge growth. You're trying to compare amateur, experimental communications with a commercial offering. I specifically took up amateur radio because I think computers and cell phones have become a boring turn-key consumer experience, unless you're writing code.
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And it's because of No-Code. We looked at the licensing statistics and thought we'd preside over the end of Amateur Radio in our own lifetimes. That's the main reason I worked on no-code. There was really strong opposition among the old contingent, and ARRL fought to preserve the code for as long as they could. Someone even asked me to let Amateur Radio die with dignity rather than sully it with no-code hams. Gee, I am glad that fight is over.
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Thank you so much for No-Code. If I ever meet you in person, I'll but you a beer (or your beverage of choice).
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We can call them (Score:2)
Handroids!
Won't be long before commodity hardware can do this.
But I still won't be giving up my Elecraft KX3!
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P.S.
I don't know why it is such a big deal, you buy a Beofeng off Ebay/Amazon and it will do all these things as well, for under $40.
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Baofeng won't do all of the nice digital codecs and apps we would like you to be able to do. Indeed, it does just about what a Motorola tube taxicab radio could do in 1954. We have a lot of new stuff for you to do.
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Beofeng is getting there, I expect they will do digital for sub $100 in a year or two.
I think the win here is that the Maker/hacker community would be fascinated by HAM radio, I know I am.
This might be the bridge. That and showing them how to make 800w tube amps....
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Yeah, I have a KX3 and a CrankIR. I run FreeDV on them.
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For anyone who has not seen an Elecraft kit, they are truly wondrous bit of kit.
HF? (Score:2)
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Yes. Probably through down-conversion. But a different architecture might be better. Some of the FlexRadio 6xxx units put the entire HF band of 0 through 30 MHz through a DAC and ADC all at once. They can actually digitize the entire spectrum and play it back later.
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What about up-conversion to handle 2.4Ghz and 5.8Ghz ranges?
Something I'd like to see is a R/C transmitter that can handle all protocols without having to change out radio modules.
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I guess you could buy transverters from Down East Microwave. This particular chip can transmit up to 1.3 GHz, but we've not tested the receiver at that frequency yet, and we're off the data sheet once we exceed 1 GHz.
Can't Wait (Score:2)
I want one*.
E
N5NEQ
*And by that I mean one per vehicle and one per office and one per home.
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With a DIY case, I could make one tough enough for Dual Sport use. Ever since the demise of the Yaesu FTM-10R there are no really good options out there.
KK6MDB
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Anonymous Coward giving their callsign....
*snicker*
One wonders what the internet would be like if we had to have callsigns on all communications....
KK6MDB, 73s!
Eventually, up to 6 bands in one radio! (Score:2)
Bye bye Uniden (Score:2)
Your product line stagnated and your latest effort was seemingly launched to no end of trouble. I said this would come and now it has.
I'm really looking forward to scanners that finally have nice UIs with modern features like GPS built-in, recording, RR db access, and communities developing for them for additional protocol support.
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I haven't really been thinking about scanners. Yes, I guess you could make some really good Open Source software for scanning with this. We could make a receive-only version. It would just be less parts on the board. Unfortunately it would have cellular-lockout, at least until we can fix that portion of ECPA. It's not like cell phones are unencrypted any longer.
awesome! (Score:2)
congratulations to you and chris. do you think it would do as a base for implementing 802.22 whitespace broadband? i have a draft version of the spec available. and what would one of these boards cost?
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The hardware would do it, you would have to write software and maybe MyHDL code for the gate array.
If we manufacture this in the U.S. and source all of the parts in the U.S. and take a reasonable margin, it will come out to $500. We don't want to go to Asian manufacturing and parts or make a lower-cost edition with some parts removed until the initial version is salable. We figure that it will take a lot of time for us to learn about Asian manufacturing, and we don't want you to have to wait.
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How will this rig differ from HackRF One? (I bought two of those last year.) I see that one of the goals is to get FCC type accepted so I guess it will probably have better filtering to reduce QRM. (HackRF doesn't have much of anything.) The HackRF goes from 30MHz to 6GHz with 20MHz of bandwidth and has an 8-bit ADC/DAC.
I'm also curious what one would use to operate an SDR transceiver. I haven't found any suitables application that make it easy to transmit with the HackRF. There are plenty
Re:awesome! (Score:4, Informative)
Michael's a good guy, but HackRF One is not a communications transceiver. He made it for hacking RFID. The receiver isn't that good and the transmitter is not FCC legal when amplified.
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And sorry, I don't know about the HackRF apps.
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We figure that it will take a lot of time for us to learn about Asian manufacturing, and we don't want you to have to wait.
Don't worry, if this becomes in any way successful, the Chinese will happily take care of all the "Asian manufacturing" without you having to do anything at all. They'll drop the price to $100 or less. That fact of life is why I wondered why you commented on preventing Chinese knock-off production, especially for an open-source/open-hardware system.
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We're not giving them everything they need to clone the device. It's Open Source software and respects your freedom, but the hardware is under a bit less than Open Hardware licensing. None of the terms effect Amateur Radio, but they do protect our land-mobile market, which is where we expect most of the money to come from.
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We're not giving them everything they need to clone the device. It's Open Source software and respects your freedom, but the hardware is under a bit less than Open Hardware licensing. None of the terms effect Amateur Radio,
This sounds very much like Icom's way dealing with their "open" D-Star protocol. The protocol definition is open but the chip to actually implement is it closed and single-sourced.
And I hate to say, if it's open for hams, then the Chinese will have it before most hams do. Do you ever wonder why the early Chinese amateur knock-offs worked very much like existing amateur radios? And why FTDI felt compelled to release a windows driver update that bricked a lot of USB/serial adapters? (I.e., whatever part o
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The D-STAR issue is not really ICOM's fault. JARL designed D-STAR (not ICOM) and put the AMBE codec in it because nobody believed that you could have a good open codec at the time. We now have Codec2 (a project I evangelized and recruited the developer) which is fully open. And we do have a software AMBE decoder in Open Source, although the patents won't let us use it. That is why I am working on the patent issue (as noted in the last slide of the presentation).
I know about the counterfeit FTDI chips, and M
Open hardware is back in style in amateur radio? (Score:2)
It's really nice to see some amateur experimenters releasing the schematics for their designs again. Ever since I've been playing with radios, the scene has been very concerned with keeping designs secret. So much of the ham software is non-free (both libre and gratis), and the developers end up retiring, dying, or abandoning their work without ever releasing the code. Finding schematics for hardware is even more difficult and I've spent much of my time redesigning circuits (or reverse-engineering them from
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Everything is shared with the Amateur community, but we have some terms that protect our land-mobile market.
The software is Open Source, but the hardware is going to be slightly less than Open Hardware, and we will be careful not to mismarket it.
It's going to start out as a $500 SDR with not enough software, and you get to write it. That is with U.S. manufacture and U.S. parts sourcing.
Very good points (Score:2)
Open source radios (Score:1)
My BITX has been in open source for more than ten years now. (www.phonestack.com/farhan/bitx.html). It has an active community that mods it, a large number of websites dedicated to it as well. It goes exactly in the opposite direction from the proposed radio. It uses very generic electronic components, it can be put together for less than 10 dollars without requiring anything beyond a soldering iron.
Open source hardware cannot mean hard to get chips, multi-layer boards and computer/phone that costs a few hu
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Very nice project.
There are healthy projects like OpenHPSDR [openhpsdr.org] that incorporate all of those things you don't like. Our radio does for VHF/UHF what OpenHPSDR does for HF.
We're trying to create the platform that can host a decade of software innovation. Thus, we do pay the cost of being on the leading edge. There will definitely be cheaper radios.
We're not selling kits. Either working PCBs, or complete radios. The hardware isn't under an Open Hardware license, although it's close.
The filter board slots are in t
Cell phone jammer? (Score:2)
Will I need a linear to jam cell signals more then 100 meters from my location? How many kW?
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If you work for a government and pay me, I'll be happy to answer that question. :-)
How about international versions? (Score:1)
For example us hams who are also like 4WD outings find that some UHF ham rigs can serve a dual role as a UHF CB, saving one extra transciever in the vehicle.
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Anyone who is good at electronics can get around regulatory lockouts. We're not allowed to make it easy. But nor are we technically able to make it impossible.
U.S. regulation only allows Part 95 certified radios to be used on GMRS, and Part 95 requires that the radio be pretty well locked down. But all of those Asian imports are certified for Part 90 and there are lots of users putting them on both Amateur and GMRS. If FCC wanted to push the issue with any particular licensee, they could.
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This is meant to be an entire FCC type-approved transceiver with spurious emissions low enough to amplify to the full legal limit for the band. You can use it with GNURadio, but you can also run the entire system stand-alone through its on-board computer and gate-array without GNURadio. HackRF has turned out not to be a very good receiver, and is not meant to be a legal transmitter regarding spurious emissions. USRP + some daughter boards might work similarly, and have higher performance in some ways, but c
Re: (Score:2)
This is meant to be an entire FCC type-approved transceiver with spurious emissions low enough to amplify to the full legal limit for the band.
Does being FCC Type approved mean there are certain frequency bands that are verboten? In other words, is the coverage continuous from 50mHz - 1gHz or are there required gaps?
I know that communications receivers capable of covering the cellphone bands were made illegal to sell in the US a while back. Just wondering how SDR will deal with such legislation going forward.
This may be a real concern where a SDR may cover bands where things like cellphones and police/military/air communications live and are heavi
Re: (Score:2)
The receiver has a block on certain cellular frequencies in the 800MHz band. This is the only restriction. The radio can tune to any frequency between 50MHz-1000MHz, otherwise.
Is this block implemented in software or hardware? Could it theoretically be bypassed/removed by someone technically oriented?
Strat
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We implement it as a chip that intercepts the serial bus to the VFO chip, and disallows certain frequencies. On FCC-certified equipment we might have to make that chip and the VFO chip physically difficult to get at by potting them or something. This first unit is test-equipment and does not have the limitation.
Re: (Score:2)
We implement it as a chip that intercepts the serial bus to the VFO chip, and disallows certain frequencies. On FCC-certified equipment we might have to make that chip and the VFO chip physically difficult to get at by potting them or something. This first unit is test-equipment and does not have the limitation.
My main interest in this SDR project would be as part of a home-brew RF/digital test/research bench for a variety of mobile cell-based equipment and development of new types of devices for new uses.
How does a company like Harris Corp. get away with manufacturing/selling Stingrays for use in the US, and can this project possibly use the same technical exceptions used by Harris Corp. to negate the requirement to artificially cripple it?
Strat
Re: (Score:2)
Test equipment is allowed to transmit and receive on those frequencies. If it looks like a radio, it can't. I have a number of cellular testers hanging around here that can act like base stations, mostly because I buy them used as spectrum analyzers and never use the (obsolete) cellular facilities. Government has different rules regarding what it can and can't do in the name of law enforcement, although FCC has been very reluctant to allow them to use cellular jammers.
If you can afford it, something from Et [ettus.com]
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You will be able to do direct-sequence spread spectrum within about 1 MHz. Frequency-hopping spread-spectrum is also possible, but is limited by the speed at which the PLL locks.
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If everything goes right, we will crowdfund an assembly run in a few months. But it's got to be working completely first and through a short manufacturing run. We won't crowdfund and then make you wait while we design and debug it, as some other projects have.
Re: (Score:2)
I think Javier Serrano at CERN wants to fund improvements in Kicad and gEDA. I don't know enough about them myself. Chris has his favorite PCB program and I didn't force him to use something else.
But you think that's bad? The gate-array has a proprietary bitstream. You need a zero-cost but proprietary program to make it. That's the one that really irks me. We hope to work on that issue eventually.
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If we put in every feature, we'd never get done. Maybe we'll have a 0-to-SHF radio eventually.
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The case selection was so that we'd have at least one case that would work. We did not take much time on it. We'd be happy to have other people designing and selling cases.
The version after this one requires cases that look like real radios. That is going to be a bigger problem. We don't yet have a mold-design partner, etc.
Re: (Score:2)
Hi AC,
Matt Ettus has a story about a Chinese cloner of the USRP. The guy tells Chinese customers that it is illegal for them to buy from Ettus, they must buy from the cloner instead. Then, when they have problems and require serivce, he tells them to get it from Ettus. Who of course made nothing from their device sales and can not afford to service them.
This is not following the rules of Open anything. It's counterfeiting.
So, sometimes it is necessary to change the license a little so that you will not be
Re: (Score:2)
We think after we build this new PCB we can go for the croudfunded manufacturing run. It's mostly surface-mount, and we expect to sell assembled boards in this run, and then the next version will be fully-packaged radios.