Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] N1Bt software board and front end design

[michael taylor]

On 10/22/05, Gituma Nturibi <address@hidden> wrote:
> Greetings  to all GNU radio enthusiasts. I'm an electronics and computer
> engineering student currently undertaking a sofware radio project for my
> final year. I would like to receive broadcast FM but the task seems to be
> quite daunting as I don't have the resources to use the USRP or the PCI card
> for reception. Is there anybody out there who has created an FM or even AM
> front end from components? I would really like to get some info on that.

Well people have been building stand-alone superhet radios for years,
but I assume you mean for GNU Radio. No, you will need some hardware
beyond a stereo sound card for the reasons Eric mentioned (i.e.
bandwidth of wide band FM is greater than the ADC of a sound card).

You could build a single or dual stage superheterodyne VHF receiver
with an IF output low enough (say 1 or 10 MHz) that you could with a
USRP and BasicRX, or your could just use the USRP + TVRX for broadcast
FM directly. You could also build a RF Front end (e.g. superhet down
conversion) and a David Carr's SSRP <http://oscar.dcarr.org/ssrp/>.

I assume that for a final year electronics engineering student
building a superhet radio is not too hard.

Chuck has a stereo FM application for GNU Radio at
<http://webpages.charter.net/cswiger/spectrum_gauges/index.html>.

> I would also like to find out more information on the N1BT software radio

Sorry, I am not familiar with this.