RadioBanter - View Single Post - Question regrading SDR, FPGA and AD9866 DDC/DUC IC for tranceiver.

Rob[_8_] · November 6th 14, 09:42 AM posted to rec.radio.amateur.homebrew

wrote:
These guys are working on a full HF SDR transceiver using a cheap modem DDC/DUC IC AD9866 .. they are also using a FPGA for processing.. and the computer will be for namesake for the UI .. its under $200 .. it would get more cheaper if somebody can find a way to get rid of the FPGA and use the computer of Processing instead of the FPGA.. the makers say it is possible, but that's not their priority.

Can some experienced HAMs look into this design and give an idea how we can get rid of the FPGA to make it cheaper and use the computer for processing instead like Softrocks, Peaberry SDR, RTL dongle, etc???

-Amogh

There are many different SDR designs and some use software, other use
hardware. When you don't like the cost or complexity of one design,
you can use another.

The designs that use a quadrature mixer to baseband followed by a soundcard
are usually the easiest do do in software because the bandwidth is
limited by the soundcard. When you want to use a device like the AD9866
you get a lot of data to process, and the FPGA is used as a first step
to do that, so the processor will not be so heavily loaded. However, it
is also possible to use a PC 3D Graphics card as a processor, and it is
able to handle that sort of load. For example, the websdr at the University
of Twente http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/ works that way.