Thursday, April 29, 2010

Opening the door to new signals

Well,

I don't manage to keep my promise of updating regularly this blog (blush). Anyway, I am improving little by little so another pretty stable thing is a board which I use to capture the new civil signals from GPS, Glonass, Galileo, Compass. I might refer to it as "TUNE".

Figure 1: Six single channel TUNE boards.

With a much wider bandwith than PRIMO, these boards can capture through USB a continuous endless stream of E5AltBOC signal with 1 bit quantisation (122.88Mbps). Two can also be connected together to have some sort of a dual-frequency sampler.

At the moment, the GUI to configure everything (tuner, clock distribution, ADC) is a little "complicated":

Figure 2: The TUNE configuration GUI.


...so it's my next part-time job to make it little more user friendly.
Some results of acquisitions and tracking of "famous" signals will follow shortly.


Regards everyone and thanks for all the comments had so far,
Michele

6 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi Michele,

that’s a very interesting board. Is it something between USRP1 and USRP2? Did you utilized the MAX2112? Why instead thUSBv2 you didn’t utilized a Gigabit Ethernet interface?

Ciao!

Gabriele

Michele said...

Hello Gabriele,

yes this board uses the MAX2112, and
USB because is a natural extension of PRIMO :)
Gigabit ethernet is on the next front-end board which will be ready later this year (it's multi frequency receiver front-end).

Ciao!
Michele

Paul Breed said...

Whee can I find oe info on this hardware design? I'm looking at using the MAX2769 and find some comments on your blog that it was aproblem, is there more information somewhere?

Michele said...

What??

Mic

克·单 said...

Hi Michele,

Do you have any test result use TUNE? Did you acq any L2C signal? You said this is extended PRIMO so did you use two 2769 two CPLD and share with one TCXO?

Good work!

Michele said...

Hi,

the "Tune" board was built to receive Galileo E5AltBOC, really. I never got round doing tests on L2C unfortunately. The board with two MAX2769 and one shared clock and CPLD is called PrimoII, but that only does 1550-1610 MHz. I have in mind to send to the fab something like a "TuneII" but I just don't have much time!

Cheers,
Michele

P.S.: Thank you for the kind words :)