← Back to context

Comment by BlackRabbit1

10 hours ago

320MSPS at this frequencies for less than $100 that can be extracted over 10GBit/s.

This was worth upper 4- to 5-digit of dollars of equipment before.

I work in this industry and sold more than one kidney for this stuff.

Same for the ESP-SDR project. Most likely it can be used for transmitting on S-Band for satellite control in the future (with an amplifier, dish, maybe some filtering). The HF-Frontend is Wi-Fi certified and therefore quite clean. I've forwarded this project to a friend who's close to ESA staff.

Most people don't have an idea just how expensive high speed Analog to Digital Converters are, yet modern wifi radios often have 2 or 3 at a price under $30. Going to Digikey right now, an ADC capable of 14 bits at 350MSPS is over $200 (quantity 1), and that doesn't come with all the other supporting hardware needed to build a radio. The magic of volume production of hardware in quantities of millions is quite something.

  • Is it tho ?

    The Rigol DHO800 has 1.25Gbps 12 bit ADC and cost less than $500, that is entire machine. I doubt the ADC parts cost more than 10% of machine.

You're referencing a 5-figure rig like the ADRV9040 I suppose? I don't work in that industry but I do dabble in SDR hobbies and I guess due to my advancing age I view this as linear progress rather than breakthroughs. Two decades ago it was $1 million worth of junk.

  • > ADRV9040

    Yes. That's a very modern design. Lots of MIMO.. so I assume you will find that beast in cellular base stations.

    I'd more see it as a huge jump in the higher frequencies.

    >2GHz basically became cheap now over night.

    Thanks to Claude&co. it now only takes maybe a few hours to find (or brute force ) potential registers to spit out raw I/Q streams. The last huge breakthrough there was the now rather old Rtlsdr project around the Osmocom dudes.