Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Considerations for new hardware in gnuradio

[Marcus D. Leech]

On 03/29/2010 11:13 PM, George Nychis wrote:
> Short but sweet response.  It would be great to have a SDR hardware
> board that works with GNU Radio that has a very, very, low latency
> connection to the host, like PCI express.  Similar to the Microsoft
> Research SDR (previously named SORA).  That would be great and open up
> possibilities of low latency MAC protocol implementations.
>
> Just sayin'!
>
> - George
More bandwidth == definitely_better

But IM(PNS)HO you don't want receiver cards living inside a PC cabinet. 
Which is why I like the
  USRP "remote" philosophy.

I'm thinking about doing some hardware myself, for the specific purpose
of radio astronomy:

    o integrated LNA/downconverter/sampler
    o common LO/sample-clock for all antenna
    o 1GiGE, probably using a compact (4-bit) coding to improve channel
bandwidth
   
This would appeal to only a small fraction of all Gnu Radio users, to be
sure.

But there are some themes that are common to other applications:

    o robust phase coherence  (any kind of aperture synthesis requires this)
    o high bandwidth (sometimes at the expense of code bits)

Fit in a tighter cost envelope.  :-)

-- 

Marcus Leech
Principal Investigator
Shirleys Bay Radio Astronomy Consortium
http://www.sbrac.org