Paul Miller wrote: > I'm just trying to get my feet wet on the subject, so the $8 - $50 > pricetag is easier to swallow than $700-$1400. I'm assuming there's a > huge amount of limitations with the sr40 over the USRP, but it can be > used successfully. That's interesting.
These are apples-to-oranges comparisons. The USRP is designed to digitize and present to the host software up to 8 MHz worth of bandwidth centered essentially anywhere from DC-3GHz, and if you're adventurous and want to reprogram the FPGA, you can do limited processing with 60 MHz wide waveforms there. (The USRP2 extends this to 25 MHz on the host and 100 MHz wide on the FPGA). Of course you can also do all the typical narrowband digital and analog waveform processing you want, and the USRP also works as a transmitter. The SoftRock-40 down-converts 48 KHz of RF spectrum at around 7 MHz center frequency, and uses your computer's sound card to digitize these into samples. This is the amateur radio 40M allocation, where there is a lot of activity in a variety of narrowband transmission modes. Clearly, these are intended for vastly different audiences, with differing requirements for RF capability, programming skills, and budget constraints. What they have in common, and what makes both such wonderful devices, is that they make RF digital signal processing accessible to large numbers of people. Not too long ago, this was an arcane discipline limited to the professional RF engineering staff of industry and government agencies. Now, along with GNU Radio, persons of the right sort of curiosity and perseverance can learn the fundamental principles of DSP and digital communications with a very small investment. GNU Radio will work with either, though as a software radio *toolkit*, GNU Radio requires you to write programs rather than having a lot of canned, pre-written, fixed-function applications. _______________________________________________ Discuss-gnuradio mailing list Discuss-gnuradio@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnuradio
