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Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Fun with Software-Defined Radio - NBitWonder

Fun with Software-Defined Radio

by Ben on Dec.12, 2011, under Experiments, Projects, Software Defined Radio

As you may know, one of the projects in the pipeline here at NBitWonder is a software-defined radio receiver, loosely modeled after Jeri Ellsworth’s receiver published earlier this year. As of this past weekend, NBW-SDR (as we call the project) is operational!

The video features a live reception of WWV, one of the United States’ atomic clock stations (much more information here). The station is located near Fort Collins, Colorado, some 2000 miles from the receiver’s location in Virginia.

There is much more work to be done on the software, as you can tell from watching the video. For instance, only AM reception is implemented right now. The signal processing functions still need some work, and more appropriate gains should be chosen for the entire signal chain. Still, it is rewarding and reassuring to see the project working at some level.

Be sure to watch the github repository and the forum for much more information as project development proceeds.

:CPLD, defined, PIC32, radio, sdr, software

Go there...
http://nbitwonder.com/blog/2011/12/12/fun-with-software-defined-radio/

First Test: Software Defined Radio

Video Link...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=dWnyZbn06qw

Uploaded by NBitWonder on Dec 12, 2011

This video shows one of the first tests of NBitWonder's NBW-SDR software defined radio project.

As you can hear, there is a lot of work to do to finalize the software before this project can be deemed "done." Still, the fact that a microcontroller and some (relatively) inexpensive hardware can receive a signal from 2,000 miles away is quite impressive.

Be sure to follow further project development in the forum (http://nbitwonder.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=52) and through the github repository for this project (https://github.com/NBitWonder/SDR).

Thanks for watching!