Close

Overview and other things

A project log for level: A New Kind of Radio Module

An agile radio designed for low power and narrow bandwidths over a wide frequency range.

hunter-scottHunter Scott 08/17/2014 at 21:160 Comments

Here's my overview video:

I only had 2 minutes, so it skips a lot of details. Here's a schematic walkthrough that goes into a little more detail:

I also wanted to address one other thing that no one has brought up yet, but I imagine may cause some confusion. I've said that this board can do 30 MHz to 4.4 GHz, but it's also narrowband. What I mean by that is the frequency synthesizer, CC430, and mixer can achieve that range (using the new mixer), but the instantaneous bandwidth is only 812 kHz. The current design has filtering for UHF. So to change the frequency to a different band (like S band), different filter values need to be used. In a real software defined radio, this would be done digitally in an FPGA. I want to change the filtering in the next version, but I haven't decided how to do it yet. Maybe an Igloo Nano or a small discrete filter bank or something. I don't want to just replicate a HackRF or Myriad RF or BladeRF or USRP, I want to make a lower performance, lower cost, and lower power radio module. 

Discussions