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UPDATE: The unit now ships from stock in 3 business days! We have now all units stocked, so there is no 2-week waiting time any more. The SDR MK1.5 'Andrus' is now in full production and has the same olive green custom aluminum profile housing as the sought-after last batch! The feedback from the units on field has been good for the whole year they have been out there, so I can assure with full confidence that the radio is really working up to the standards I hoped for when designing it! About the radio: The receiver is really a long step forward from MK1 units I designed on 2011. The major difference in usability is, that the MK1.5 unit has now a 10/100base Ethernet adapter built-in, what allows using up to 400kHz IF bandwidth over the network! This is really an improvement, as it is now fully utilizing a good-quality radio circuit what was used already for MK1, but was not able to perform to full capacity because of the processor on the old unit being too slow. If the above sounded too cryptic, then in simple terms it means that on your SDR software screen you are now able to see a 400kHz wide chunk of radio spectrum at once, given that the software supports it of course. This is almost 10 times wider than budget SDR-s using ordinary soundcards! In addition, the radio has a panadapter channel, what displays the entire 32MHz range of shortwave spectrum at once! This mode is invaluable for tuning antennas, configuring downconverters etc. The radios do have NetSDR compatible protocol for networking support but they do not identify themselves as RFspace radios (for a very good reason that this would violate their rights!), so I will not give out any promises that they will be working with the proprietary software RFspace may have. However, to keep the software developers life a little easier, I did adapt existing protocol. The second serious improvement over the MK1 unit and many other units on the field is the internal clocking system, what is using a programmable clock synthesizer running off the 1.5ppm generator. Thanks to this approach, literally any sample rate up to 400KHz is possible to use with the radio and the temperature-compensated clock generator will guarantee that so the units stay spot-on to the frequency without any need for calibration. The full (long!) list of improvements can be found here: http://files.uvb-76.net/SDR_MK1.5/SDR_MK1.5_changelog.pdf The radio itself is a fully digital design with two identical RF frontends possible to use simultaneously, so you can have one channel available for monitoring something, while another one can be used for scanning around the band. The presence of two channels also enables combining the two signals, so in urban areas it is possible to use the second channel for noise cancelling! This feature makes the MK1.5 a unique design at least for now, as I have no knowledge that there would be any other amateur/consumer SDR radios available what would allow that! Please check blog post at http://uvb-76.blogspot.com/2011/06/sdr-mk1-radio-has-now-diversity-mode.html for more information. (This is for MK1, but is also valid for MK1.5) The second channel can also be used for creating wideband panadapter monitoring, so entire spectrum from 5kHz to 30MHz can be plotted on screen at once. The in-depth specifications, as well as the full description of the design and schematic can be found from the http://uvb-76.net website at the SDR MK1 section. Some technical details hereby:
It is an open design in both, software and firmware perspective, so in case you want to customize the firmware of the radio for your own purpose, it is perfectly doable! As the schematic and layout for the radio is also available, it may also serve as the platform for your own integration project. The on-board Atmel 32-bit AT32UC3B0512 processor development GNU tools (C/C++, asm) with really nice Microsoft Visual Studio version 10 IDE are freely available from Atmel and there is an extension connector on-board with RS232TTL UART, I2C and GPIO pins dedicated for add-on hardware and user development. There is also a simplistic analog audio output on-board (24kHz/16-bit mono), what can be used for whatever it could be useful for, and a small prototyping area (space originally dedicated for custom PoE (power-over-ethernet) circuit development). The in-depth analysis of the design, schematics and documentation can be found from: http://uvb-76.net/p/sdr-mk15-andrus.html |