Low cost SDR hardware

GNU Radio
1

Hello everyone,

A professor in my university wants to revive lab course on
communication.
He wants to introduce some experiments involving SDR. For that we need
about 100 pieces of hardware( both receiver and transmitter). Buying 100
USRP is not a viable solution for us. We can go for RTL SDR but it has
only
transmitter. Does anyone know of a good solution for low cost hardware,
(transmitter + receiver or just transmitter) preferably GNU Radio
compatible, that we could opt for?

2

Hi Manu,

What is your output power requirement? Frequency coverage? Do you have
a
target price? Do you have LO phase coherency requirements?

Support for nuand’s bladeRF was just recently pushed to gr-osmosdr for
both
GNU Radio 3.6 and 3.7. The output power is 6dBm CW, so with some
backoff
for linearity and PAPR on your transmission signal, you’re probably at
-6dBm or so for transmission. Harmonic filtering is required if you
plan
to hook it up to an antenna. The frequency coverage is from 300MHz -
3.8GHz and costs $420/board.

More information can be found here:

http://nuand.com

Feel free to e-mail me directly off list if you’d like to discuss more.

Brian

Full disclosure: I’m involved with nuand and bladeRF.

3

Hello,

For just teaching even a speaker and microphone work well to add real
world
effects like AWGN, echos, delays, and Doppler effects on communication
channels. Does everyone need a transmitter? Over here we have just one
USRP
and a whole lot of RTLSDR’s so everyone can practice receiving and
demodulating real signals from outside sources and when needed signals
generated in lab.

Andrew

4

Manu T S [email protected] writes:

Hello everyone,

A professor in my university wants to revive lab course on communication.
He wants to introduce some experiments involving SDR. For that we need
about 100 pieces of hardware( both receiver and transmitter). Buying 100
USRP is not a viable solution for us. We can go for RTL SDR but it has only
transmitter. Does anyone know of a good solution for low cost hardware,
(transmitter + receiver or just transmitter) preferably GNU Radio
compatible, that we could opt for?

There is of course the (quite awesome) HackRF[1] which will eventually
be
sold for roughly $300 (not sure what the price break for 100 units might
be). That being said, it’s still in beta and there aren’t anywhere near
100 units available at the moment. You might be able to get in touch
with mossmann (CC’d) to see if you could use his production contacts to
do a small production run.

Cheers,

  • Ben

[1] GitHub - greatscottgadgets/hackrf: low cost software radio platform

5

I get the feeling that you would like something significantly lower cost
to
support 100 units. Arrow Electronics partnered with several
manufacturers
to develop the BeRadio (http://www.arrownac.com/solutions/beradio/).
There
is no driver/FPGA build for an interface to Gnuradio, but with enough
students working on it, it should not be a problem. Single part price is
$79
but I expect Arrow may give a significant price break for a university.

Evan M. - Be at war with your vices, at peace with your
neighbors,
and let every new year find you a better man - Ben Franklin

-----Original Message-----
From: discuss-gnuradio-bounces+evan=removed_email_address@domain.invalid
[mailto:discuss-gnuradio-bounces+evan=removed_email_address@domain.invalid] On Behalf Of
Ben
Gamari
Sent: Tuesday, July 30, 2013 10:59 AM
To: Manu T S; GNURadio D.ion List; [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Low cost SDR hardware

Manu T S [email protected] writes:

Hello everyone,

A professor in my university wants to revive lab course on communication.
He wants to introduce some experiments involving SDR. For that we need
about 100 pieces of hardware( both receiver and transmitter). Buying 100
USRP is not a viable solution for us. We can go for RTL SDR but it has
only
transmitter. Does anyone know of a good solution for low cost hardware,
(transmitter + receiver or just transmitter) preferably GNU Radio
compatible, that we could opt for?

There is of course the (quite awesome) HackRF[1] which will eventually
be
sold for roughly $300 (not sure what the price break for 100 units might
be). That being said, it’s still in beta and there aren’t anywhere near
100 units available at the moment. You might be able to get in touch
with mossmann (CC’d) to see if you could use his production contacts to
do a small production run.

Cheers,

  • Ben

[1] GitHub - greatscottgadgets/hackrf: low cost software radio platform