[Discuss-gnuradio] GNU Radio / USRP Alternatives --- > Re: GRCon13 Hardware Giveaway!

[Software Defines Radio]

Ian,

While I am unaware of how qualitative the Lime Micro Systems Chips are,

what worry's me about these GNU Radio / USRP Alternatives:

>  - Fairwaves UmTRX
>  - Lime Micro MyriadRF
>  - Loctronix A-2300

Is that all the above listed SDR devices utilizes a 1 product company, and the last one we had was Elonics who produced the famous RTLSDR stick.

But Elonics is bankrupt, so whoever is purchasing / designing around those chipsets, I'd be nervous.

Also, for the price of just 1 Lime MicroSystems chip, $110 as of this date, is still $30 more than purchasing 2 Analog Device chipsets who offers you MORE Radio Frequencies.

The BladRF & ALL of EpiqSolutions products suffers from this as well as they utilize the Lime Microsystems Chipset.

I avoid purchasing Ettus Research Products since he he got the Open Source Community to design applications around his USRP that he claimed to " Release the PCB board layout files " but never did.

Its documented here:

I also got the schematics for my TV set and my video recorder.
But that's for service and repair. It's not free hardware.
As far as I know the USRP designs are copyrighted and not under a free
hardware license. Correct?

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/discuss-gnuradio/2011-01/msg00533.html

Other than that, the UmTRX is what I'd purchase as your purchasing the support/brillance of the Russians behind it.

On Fri, Aug 30, 2013 at 11:21 AM, Ian Buckley <address@hidden> wrote:

>
> It's also interesting to see that 3 out of 5 are LMS6002D based
> hardware. This chip sure gets around ...
>
>

Well the reason why it "gets around" is that it's done poorly competitively against other devices in the top tier customer accounts, thus they are force to scratch around and find any possible business. Sadly for us the nature of this segment of the Semiconductor market is such that the most successful manufacturers know who their major target customers are and are focused solely on winning their business, whilst maintaining almost paranoid design security in the process in what they perceive as a very competitive space. We have to be realistic that we, as a market segment are both tiny, and built around a core principal of extensive public technical information disclosure, and that closes the door to access some technologies.

-Ian

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