Hi Martin, that's a bit of a wide field there :) In essence, there's not a single answer to your question: whether your hardware is sufficiently fast depends on what you do with it!
For example: 192 kb/s is really not much data to process, if there's a simple (say, Hamming(4,7) ) error-correcting code to be decoded on it. It's going to be tough to calculate if it's been through a large LDPC code and you want to do 50 iterations of a message passing decoder to really get even the last bit out of your channel. But, you say "amateur satellite communications", which probably at a first approximation means you're using modes that are currently common in that community, or such that are currently constructed with complexity in mind. So, yeah. Most things *should* work on the four 1.5 GHz ARM Cortex-A72 cores of a raspberry pi 4 Model B. Note that there's very different Raspberry Pi models, so make sure you get the latest generation. Also note that your Raspberry Pi doesn't have to do *all* the work, if in doubt: for example, the relatively compute-intense steps could be, on demand, done on a laptop with significantly more computational power. So, it should work. However, that's a "should": I've got exactly zero knowledge of people who have done that, and a back-of-envelop calculation saying, hm, yeah, that compute power should suffice assuming the usage of sufficiently optimized software doesn't say sufficiently optimized software is available to you. But honestly, I think there's really a treasure trove of online information and working groups on that topic. Maybe pay the GNU Radio Amateur Radio Working Group a virtual visit [1]; I'm sure there's much experience with satellite comms in that channel. If text-chatting isn't very much your thing, maybe also try showing up to one of their monthly video calls[2], and hang around before or after the invited talk and chat a bit. Of course, as the largest community of citizen-operated satellite groundstations, I bet satnogs[3] has guidance on hardware. I do know they have raspberry Pi images, but I honestly don't know whether they're doing the digital communications part on that, or whether they are just recording the spectrum and maybe do some simple demodulation (FM demod?). Admittedly, and regrettably, not my prime area of expertise. However, whenever I meet satnogs people, they're a friendly bunch! They have a well-kept online forum[4], that's very active, and also a matrix presence[5]. Best regards, Marcus [1] via Matrix chat: #HamRadio:gnuradio.org; easily reachable via https://chat.gnuradio.org/#/room/#HamRadio:gnuradio.org [2] https://wiki.gnuradio.org/index.php/Talk:HamRadio [3] https://wiki.satnogs.org/Main_Page [4] https://community.libre.space/t/new-users-welcome/29 [5] #satnogs:matrix.org (I think you really might want to have a Matrix account on some arbitrary homeserver ;) ) On 21.05.21 10:20, Martin Elfvelin via USRP-users wrote: > Hello all, > > I'm building a ground station for amateur satellite communications on the VHF > and UHF > bands using a B210. The SDR will be connected to a mini-pc and I'm trying to > figure out > the system requirements. The PC will be controlling the SDR, running the > signal > processing at low data rates (4k8 - 19k2 bps) as well as controlling other > hardware. > Basically the PC is the brain of the ground station. I've seen people making > ground > stations with Raspberry Pi but I'm wondering if 1.5 GHz quad core is enough > processing > power in this case. Any help would be much appreciated. > > Best regards > Martin Elfvelin > > _______________________________________________ > USRP-users mailing list -- usrp-users@lists.ettus.com > To unsubscribe send an email to usrp-users-le...@lists.ettus.com _______________________________________________ USRP-users mailing list -- usrp-users@lists.ettus.com To unsubscribe send an email to usrp-users-le...@lists.ettus.com
