Universal Radio Grabber: the USRP 189
Nethemas the Great writes "The Universal Software Radio Peripheral or USRP created by Matt Ettus and Eric Blossom gives a new perspective on the radio spectrum, as in just about all of it from DC to 2.9Ghz. With the right software and daughterboards, their USRPs can capture FM, read GPS, decode HDTV, transmit over emergency bands, track peoples movement via their mobile phones, and much, much more. With prices starting at just $550 this new toy is accessible by most anyone."
P2P Telephone? (Score:3, Interesting)
How is this legal? (Score:5, Interesting)
Homebrew SETI? (Score:5, Interesting)
Open source radio astronomy anyone?
Re:P2P Telephone? (Score:3, Interesting)
decoding HDTV? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:P2P Telephone? (Score:3, Interesting)
If you really want privacy, what you want is some really strong, good encryption. I would, if you are paranoid, encrypt your messages many times each time with a different key.
People often claim wireless is the solution to everything. It definitely is not. RF spectrum is very dear and limited, and there are often quite a few fights over who will get to use which bands. Its not an unlimited resource. Fiber optics can deliver far greater data capacity than wireless ever will.
Re:Depends on the country (Score:1, Interesting)
From http://www.privacyrights.org/fs/fs2-wire.htm [privacyrights.org]:
The important part is the "readily altered to receive such frequencies." This product seems to receive the entire spectrum by default. I guess you could apply bandpass filters to limit the user, but it would be trivial to bypass those filters.
No restrictions in the US? (Score:1, Interesting)
http://www.afn.org/~afn09444/scanlaws/ [afn.org]
Let freedom ring...
Well (Score:1, Interesting)
Phrasing it that way, this sounds kind of cool, but you bet your ass they will make these illegal
Re:I hear hype... (Score:4, Interesting)
Dave
WinRadio (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The real question (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm just intending to clarify things, as your social contract statement seems to indicate that you believe that authority can grant or take away rights at whim, as long as it's written down somewhere, or otherwise generally agreed upon. I'm assuming this is a European idea.
The ramifications are that U.S. citizens have a basis for determining when a government has overstepped its bounds (whether they actually do is a different story), where the social contract idea seems to provide little justification for being critical of authority. I'm sure in either case it doesn't make much difference practically speaking, but we're coming from fundamentally opposed viewpoints. (i.e. humans have certain rights no matter what, vs. the only rights you have are what society agrees on.)
But, you're right, there's no inalienable right to receive RF signals and decode them, as far as I'm aware, in the U.S. Constitution or otherwise.
Re:Homebrew SETI? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Ouch $550 (Score:4, Interesting)
Buying the chips in small quantities leads to about $100 just for the 4 main chips (two analog interface chips, one FPGA, one USB microcontroller). The PCB is likely to be around $20 if it's more than a two layer and in small quantities. The labor to assemble just a few of them is likely $50-$100.
$550 isn't a bad price. But there's a reason the PCB isn't open sourced like all the other design files - the company wants (needs) to make money and recoup its investment.
Still, one sufficiently motivated could reduce the cost of the entire board and probably include the popular generic modules to the $200 range if they were able to get a comitment to purchase from say 100 people.
It's a neat concept, and one I'd like to get into, but right now it's not something that you use so much as tinker with. It's for researchers and hobbyists. Once there is real time hdtv decoder software in linux that runs with this, and a good tv/radio record/pause/skip program, as well as a nice simple scanner application then it will become something worth having for the general linux hacker.
I think someone could make a good bit of money if they made a small module that just had one A/D interface, the FPGA, a cable modem tuner, and the usb microcontroller. It could sell for $100, which would be cheap enough for regular hackers to get it and start making really cool tv/radio applications for.
-Adam
Re:"the right daughterboards" (Score:3, Interesting)
1.) The hardware design (schematics, layouts, etc) are OPEN;
2.) The FPGA Verilog code is OPEN;
3.) The software is GPL.
As to the computational power of the CPU, I'm thinking an FPGA coprocessor could be used to great effect; something like a DRC coprocessor in a socket 940 (Opteron socket): see http://www.drccomputer.com/pages/modules.html [drccomputer.com] for details. Run the correlation and other functions in the FPGA and offload the grunt work of the algorithm to the hardware logic you blow into the FPGA.
In my own experience, a continuum analysis (power spectrum integration using cascaded FIR filters) and a simultaneous FFT can run with 65% of a 3GHz Xeon, with all the X11 overhead taking 50% of a second 3GHz Xeon. The hard part is sustaining continuous 32MB/s writes over a period of hours (I have a Dell 2850 here with hardware RAID that can do 150MB/s writes in theory; in practice even that can skip samples). And that is using the GNUradio Python framework; tuned C would likely be less taxing on the CPU.
In contrast, we are working on other projects that are running an order or two of magnitude higher sample rates; one with be sampling 12 channels at 1.5GS/s 8 bits and performing a correlation for probing the interstellar medium using compact extragalactic sources at 2.1 and 8.5GHz. That will require the equivalent of an 800GHz Xeon; only hardware FPGA correlation is anywhere close to fast enough, and even then we're talking $10K high end Xilinx Virtex 4's.
Coprocessing FPGA's are basically required for real-time processing of this sort.
Re:"the right daughterboards" (Score:3, Interesting)
I'll bet it's not long before the USRP/GnuRadio people hook up with the graphics card as a compute engine folks. Graphics cards are well suited for high-speed signal processing, and would give you the ability to process high-bandwidth signals in realtime even on an ordinary PC.
GPGPU: General-Purpose computation on GPUs [gpgpu.org]
The FFT on a GPU [unm.edu]
GPU-FFTlib - Graphics Card based Implementation of the Fast Fourier Transform [caesar.de]
--Pat