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> affordable for students and RF enthusiasts Takes a lot of scrolling to see the price, which is $480. That's probably affordable considering the specs. But th
by dancek 8y ago
> affordable for students and RF enthusiasts
Takes a lot of scrolling to see the price, which is $480. That's probably affordable considering the specs. But the cheap way to experiment with an SDR is to repurpose a $20 USB TV tuner.
- nobodyshere 8y agoAs long as you don't plan to transmit. A 20 bucks tuner is cute, but won't get you too far, especially with noise and heat problems affecting signal quality. But yeah, a generally nice way of getting to know sdr and whether you're interested in it at all before spending serious money on grown up boards.
- opless 8y agoEven the HackRF clones are a quarter of the cost and are much more capable than a 20-40 dollar SDR
- superkuh 8y agoFor the frequency ranges in which they overlap the rtlsdr dongles out perform the HackRF. I bought my first rtlsdr in early 2013 and am a HackRF kickstarter backer. The BladeRFs are great if you want to do serious work like running cell basestations. That extra price you pay is worth it in that regard.
- acd 8y agoThe cheapest way is to start with a RTL SDR tuner and for example Gnuradio. If you want to experiment with celluar mobile radios LTE you need a LimeSDR, BladeRF and a help processor.
- yasp 8y agoWhat is a help processor?
- acd 8y agoHelp CPU I meant, something accelerating the signal processing from the software defined radio often a FPGA, field programmable gate array.
- iwiririwo 8y agoIn context of GnuRadio and similar, do any projects already utilize FPGA acceleration as offered by USRP? From what I've seen, it all happens on the CPU.
- rsync 8y ago"If you want to experiment with celluar mobile radios LTE you need a LimeSDR, BladeRF and a help processor." Why would you need a LimeSDR and a BladeRF ? I have done plenty of (rx only) GSM/LTE functions with only the (v1) BladeRF ...
- snaky 8y agoIf you really want LTE, it's more about xtrx than LimeSDR and BladeRF.
- gsich 8y agoAdalm Pluto comes to mind.