A number of us SDR experimenters have been building such a thing. The sound card part is called Janus and I believe it has quite good performance. It's based on the AK5394a chip, and can be jumpered to not have an attenuator on the inputs. More details on it at: http://hpsdr.org/wiki/index.php?title=JANUS
The controller for this guy is Ozymandias (Ozy) and includes a USB2 FX2 microcontroller to talk to the PC and an FPGA to implement the logic needed to deal with the A/D converters and D/A converters. It will also be able to act as a USB to SDR 1000 PIO Parallel port bridge once we get all of the FX2, Verilog and PowerSDR code done. Once all that is done one will be able to connect the Ozy to a USB2 port on the PC and that will be the only radio to computer cable needed. (Of course you will need cables from the Ozy and Janus to the PowerSDR). More details on Ozy at: http://hpsdr.org/wiki/index.php?title=OZY This thing is being done as part of the HPSDR.org project. The Ozy and Janus are all working at a basic hardware level and we're in the process of doing a 2nd Alpha on the boards to verify changes made after the 1st round of boards. Phil Harman has used his Janus with an SDR 1000 to claim QSO #1 for the soundcard. We've still got a bit of work on firmware and software to get the SDR 1000 control stuff implemented but as they say it's just software! After the 2nd alpha is proved out I expect assembled boards will be available from TAPR. It's all open source and we're always looking for help if you want to write some code, FX2 firmware or Verilog. Currently we need to do some FX2 work for the parallel port control, modify PowerSDR to use it, as well as write some Verilog and FX2 code to provide a self test suite capability to be used to validate assembled boards. Regards, Bill At 04:41 PM 9/26/2006, Tayloe Dan-P26412 wrote: >It would sure be great as an initial start to simply provide this >portion of the project as a gang busters audio card though. I for one >am disappointed with the current state of the art in sound cards such as >my Firebox. It requires entirely too much gain to get the best >sensitivity out of the thing, probably because of attenuators on the >line inputs. It would be really, really nice to have the sound card >inputs optimized for SDR use. ><....> >- Dan, N7VE _______________________________________________ FlexRadio mailing list FlexRadio@flex-radio.biz http://mail.flex-radio.biz/mailman/listinfo/flexradio_flex-radio.biz Archive Link: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexradio%40flex-radio.biz/ FlexRadio Homepage: http://www.flex-radio.com
