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Universal Software Radio Peripheral From GnuRadio
The Universal Software Radio Peripheral for GNURadio has now gone into production and is
available for purchase for $450. It used to be insanely expensive to acquire this
technical equipment. Now the price has dropped by two orders of magnitude, to something about as expensive as a high-end graphics card. How long will it be till it's labeled a terrorist tool and banned?
This is great news : software defined radios are über-cool and the Gnuradio project is quite promising. I hope that someone will soon package it with enclosure and daughtercards and market it to people who are not willing to do the seemingly required hardware assembly.
This looks like an excellent step towards a turn-key software defined radio but I have a dumb question:
Why go with usb2.0 as the interface instead of pci or multiple usb2.0 connectors (is the usb 2.0 bandwidth limit a total value or a per/channel value?) I know you want to isolate the radio receiver from all the RF noise inside the PC but there are giga-sample a/d cards that go inside boxes already... Just wondering
I remember an editorial in QEX not too long ago that suggested there were already political efforts under way to regulate the sale of high-performance ADCs.
SDR is eventually going to make the Stalinist wannabees on Capitol Hill very nervous indeed. There is already precedent for banning the manufacture and sale of certain types of receiving equipment (Electronic Communications Privacy Act, 1987), so I would not take the availability of this technology for granted if I were you. It wouldn't be the least bit surprising to see a Federal ban on private ownership of high-speed analog-to-digital converters at the IC level.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
Some years ago, I was doing some work on a laser rangefinder, and got to the point where I needed about $20K in test gear to find out why it wasn't working right. Something like this would have been a big help.
Radio hams will find uses for this. It should be great for working on new data transmission schemes for high-noise links, like HF.
LabView support would be nice.
But, he's right in pointing out that the powers that be do not have a vested interest in allowing citizens to own a general purpose reciever/transmitter. It marginalizes their sense of control.
Like PGP/GPG, buy one, use it, build an economy around it BEFORE they start thinking about making it illega.
Kremax
--- Little Atomo - The Amazing Thinking Robot from Atomocom! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIP9KisHi4k
"It wouldn't be the least bit surprising to see a Federal ban on private ownership of high-speed analog-to-digital converters at the IC level."
Look up dual-use technology and try again. Don't you guys get tired of being paranoid every second of every day, about everything? It's draining just reading your post.
It's not a transmitter as far as I understand.
Correct, the USRP (Universal Software Radio Peripheral) base module itself is not an transmitter. There is an additional $50 USD basicTX modules available.
"Terrorist tool" is simply nonsense on the part of the submitter or editor. Ignore the poor fool.
Unlicensed operation and interference are not a new issue, (radio stations use to "compete" by trying to transmit by "out-gunning" by using more power (Watts) on a given frequency (e.g. 105.7 MHz)) are why departments like the FCC were created.
The basicTX module is low enough power on its own (1mW I believe it produces) that it does not require regulation AFAIK.
How long will it be till it's labeled a terrorist tool and banned?
I'm seriously asking what else has been banned under the concerns of terrorism?
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Did you look at the website in the article? this thing will accept up to 4 transmitter and 4 reciever daughter boards. The boards avaliable are not that harmfull, but anyone with basic electronic and programming knowledge could "re-wire" the thing. ITs a nice radio, but it will transmit and receive, and easily do it in the 88-108MHZ WFM radio band.
-William
God is everything science has yet to explain.
With the right software, it takes control away from the FCC and Congress. The SDR doesn't care if the software that you download isn't type accepted by the FCC or does things that Congress doesn't like, like listening to their cell phone calls.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
This thing can recieve HDtv - so you can ignore the broadcast flag. That obviously makes it a terrorist tool.
-Ariel
If you examine the madwifi driver FAQ it makes reference to regulations explicitly permitting "open" code controlling hardware that can receive/transmit many frequencies.
5.3. Why is the HAL closed source?
The Atheros chipset can tune to frequencies that are out of the ISM band(s). These frequencies are licensed by various regulatory agencies, and radar systems thus an open HAL is disallowed by just about every regulatory institution in existence (i.e. FCC etc). On a practical/usability note: Were it not for the binary nature of the HAL, then the same nerds who deploy the "power hack" for the WET11 could be generating emissions all over the restricted bands using madwifi hardware. Ask yourself, which would you rather have, more power, or less interference?
I expect just receivers will bear less of a burden, but I would not be surprised if Gnu Radio was already illegal with massive criminal penalties associated.
Which is an atrocity, frankly. Please correct me. Please.
Tired of Political Trolls? Opt Out!
He was told by a store to come in and pick up a refund check. WHen he got there, they told him it wouldn't be ready til the next day. He got pissed, ranted and raved, cops showed up, and told him it was a terrorist threat to challenge the manager to meet him outside.
Anything the Powers That Be want to label as terrorist; that's what is terroristic these days. When Disney sees SDR as a threat to Mickey Mouse, it will be labeled a terrorist tool.
Infuriate left and right
The idea behind soft-radio is that you grab a signal from the air and use software to 'decode' it instead of hardware. So all decoding becomes an issue of software and not hardware.
You can grab an FM signal from an antenna, use some software 'stuff', and get your favorite local station to come out the computer speaker. The only hardware you need is an antenna and a frontend to pump the signal into your computer. This device is that frontend interface between the RF capture device (antenna, dish, etc) and the computer, via a USB2 plug. The reason it was developed was that this kind of hardware was either very specific (grab only FM signals or TV signals) or very expensive (the cost of a new computer or two).
The reason this will be labeled a terrorist device is because you can grab any signal from the spectrum (if you can make an antenna) so all the decoding becomes a software problem. You develop a program to decode HBO's satellite feed, and bang, this thing gets banned as a pirate device, err terrorist device as that's the buzzword dejour. Special interests will push this through Gov like everything else and claim it's destroying American capitalism, meanwhile never mentioning their monopolies destroy fair competition and hurt the consumer when prices rise.
Geeks will lament as not only is this device a reciever but it's a transmiter as well. Want to make an ad-hoc WiFi-like network on some other frequency? What about a smart 'cell' phone that makes it's own network so you don't need a common provider (think p2p phones)? As it's so new, the possibilities have not been well thought out, but technologies like this are a solution looking for a problem, kinda like the PC in the 1980s.
Of the set of problems in the world that can be solved using software only, hardware only, or a mix of the two, problems are generally moving toward the software solving side.
In other words, radio can be completely received, down converted, and demodulated in hardware and by and large this is how it is done.
However, if you instead receive and downconvert the radio signal, then you can let software take over for the demodulation, and in the case of HDTV further digital decoding.
Further, this device can work on about 32MHz of the signal spectrum at a time. This doesn't mean much until you realize that the entire FM radio band (88.1MHz - 107.9MHz) fits within that slice of bandwidth. You can use this radio to decode the entire audio of all the radio statiosn in the area simultaneously. Live in detroit? Listen to and record every single radio station with one device. Not so terribly useful for the consumer, but nice for the re-streamer, radio fanatic, FCC, NSA, etc.
Bandwidth of an NTSC TV signal is about 6MHz. Watch/record 4-5 consecutive channels simultaneously.
HDTV is about 8MHz. Watch and record 3-4 consecutive channels simultaneously.
In short, it's a move from less hardware to more softare. The biggest advantage is not less hardware, but more flexibility. This one tuner can be used to tune your HDTV, TV, radio, 802.11, bluetooth, etc.
-Adam