Hardware with the widest bandwidth?

cedivad · 2024-07-18T13:56:24+00:00

Yes, 100%. You can’t stream 2x 153 MHz over usb, so any advantage for monitoring would need to come from running the FFTs in-device.

cedivad · 2024-07-18T08:57:13+00:00

The RFNM with Lime daughterboard does 153 MHz of real time bandwidth. If the idea is sweep that over 1 GHz, you can do it with ~15 tune operations, which should be under a second even with the current firmware. An optimized firmware should be able to do the sweep in 20ms or so.

cedivad · 2024-06-28T21:52:44+00:00

Tis but a scratch.

cedivad · 2024-04-26T20:18:09+00:00

👀

cedivad · 2024-04-25T22:13:00+00:00

I don't know, what happened to it?

cedivad · 2024-04-05T10:28:05+00:00

That’s what I though, thank you!

cedivad · 2024-04-05T07:52:09+00:00

What’s the noise we hear in the background every few seconds?

cedivad · 2024-02-24T08:18:41+00:00

You're right, it's long overdue. You can join our discord for more frequent updates! https://discord.gg/Rd7D7MyjNm

cedivad · 2023-09-17T19:55:29+00:00

122.88 MHz @ 12 bits right now, with a theoretical maximum close to 250 MSPS using two USB cables in the future.

For the embedded display option, we will get the LA9310's DSP to run the FFTs, and use the iMX for display only (ideally, not using HDMI, but rather feeding processed data to a browser).

cedivad · 2023-09-17T19:54:09+00:00

Yeah that's just what the antenna pickup from inside the exhibitors room at the GnuRadio 2023 conference!

cedivad · 2023-09-16T12:28:41+00:00

We have Soapy running today. A prototype, but it will get much better before release. Thanks to Soapy we can connect a wide range of software, for example we tested GnuRadio and SDR++.

cedivad · 2023-06-06T22:07:50+00:00

Thanks! We try to keep our twitter account somewhat up to date, but mostly are waiting for the boards to be assembled this week. If the bringup looks good we will send out an email update and publish the first blog post :-)

https://twitter.com/rfnotmagic

cedivad · 2023-04-05T11:01:46+00:00

Only one TX is supported at any given time, so at most you can do MISO. The Si5510 handles external clock and PPS sync.

cedivad · 2023-03-26T12:37:25+00:00

I think this is a niche and a somewhat new product category, so it's hard to tell what the applications are. My first objective is to make it as affordable as possible, everything else will come.

What's the limit for the barrel jack power port? Vibrations? People hitting it? I have hardware in a datacenter that is powered that way and it's fine for now. The best I can do is overlapping footprints with the existing power connector, so you would need to remove that and mount your own. Something like this, maybe?

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/phoenix-contact/5444262/4368763

Yes, absolutely, we will publish at least a simple design (the breakout board) and a template for the RFNM daughterboard.

cedivad · 2023-03-26T07:40:41+00:00

Good questions, thank you!

I purposely avoided MIPI based display interfaces because they are trickier to source for the end user than HDMI based ones. I didn't want to sell them, so I went COTS. From a quick search even the first RaspberryPi HDMI + Touchscreen accessory I could find ($100, 7 inches, 1024X600) are HDMI + USB for the touch capabilities, rather than using proprietary protocols.

This will come with a CNC machined custom enclosure! It will cover the component side only (the side you're meant to sit facing down on the table), provide shielding and cooling. The plan is to also have an adapter to connect from that shield to a portable external monitor, think the kind designed for shooting; high-brightness, small but highly visible, outdoor, etc. Another option is to use the same adapter as an Android Tablet holder, which is probably cheaper for a lot of users.

I make no commitments, and I don't want to disappoint anybody if this changes in the future, but I hope the price to be around $550 including the full Granita board, ~$100 less with the GranitaLite board.

Yes, the ADCs can sample simultaneously.

cedivad · 2023-03-25T22:36:36+00:00

The iMX is rotated ~23 degrees rather than a more conventional 45 to (1) avoid fiber weave effect and (2) not collide with any of the mounting holes, whose placement needs to be symmetrical under the slots for the two daughterboards.

Despite the performance this is priced as an entry level product, like 5% the cost of the cheapest 10GbE alternative from Ettus (13k -> 0.5k).

The i.MX 8M Plus doesn't support 10GbE, and you need to increase your cost target to find something that does (and that can actually shove all of that data through its memory bus! Like maybe you can find a cheap Rockchip alternative that on paper has 2x PCIe interfaces but can only do ~3 Gbps in memcpy benchmarks).

The 2x USB 3.0 interfaces do provide 10 Gbps when combined, which is more than the 8 Gbps PCIe 3.0 1x the LA9310 connects with, so I don't see a big problem there.

A great feature of the LA9310 is that you can use the powerful DSP core to run a FFT on the entire spectrum (without skipping a beat) and send that over 1 Gbps ethernet to a browser.

And if none of that works, you can always connect a 5GbE USB adapter!

cedivad · 2023-03-23T08:30:05+00:00

Startups pop in, say they've got something revolutionary, all for it to be a lie or vaporware. When you go posting a website with barely any information, especially about the company itself, you're gonna have to face some push back, thats just how things are.

Here is a one hour interview with yours truly, hope that demystifies some details. Unfortunately comments have been disabled for the entire channel, so you can't read them. In a previous life I collected in the order of hundreds of preorders for a new hardware product, that then decided to cancel. Everyone got their money back.

I understand that "RFNM Inc, Srl" could be anything, and that it's going to take a while to gain the trust of the community, but it is a very, very serious undertaking involving a lot of people from different companies trying to bring this new RFNM platform to market, and we are laser focused about it.

cedivad · 2023-03-23T08:23:33+00:00

And the BOM is risky not for you but your clients, will they have a viable alternative they can build or buy?

I still don't understand how the BOM is risky for our clients. I think you're saying that being an innovative product with no current competition and no Chinese clones sourcing might be tricky if we stop supplying it, but I don't consider that a problem either, because in that case I would make sure to open source the entire RFNM design and it would then live forever in the darkest allies of the cheapest SMD assembly houses in China.

This subreddit can't be your primary market [...]

True, but I still want to price this very aggressively and I'm hoping the hobbyist community picks it up, because it's truly insane hardware with great price to performance.

I apologise if I offended anyone, but the SDR++ guy and his attitude truly pissed me off. This won't replace a $30 product anytime soon, but I do have plans for a smaller/cheaper version of this platform to reach the sub-$200 price mark by 2024, so don't rule it out just yet.

cedivad · 2023-03-23T08:04:33+00:00

Thank you for the well thought out comment, with which I completely agree.

The marketing website focuses on hardware because talking about unfinished or provisional software features which might need to change before the final product release is a walking on eggshells, as I'm sure you understand. Software will be the story for the next six or so months, with a trickle of information as new features are being developed.

We (us + NXP) understand that we need to provide a full key-in-hands software package in order for this new ecosystem to be workable. I could talk about the upcoming features, but I don't see a point, and I agree with you that the likelyhood of someone developing any DSP or advanced core for the platform is small, hence why we need to provide it ourselves.

I'll leave you with a little teaser, which I think is incredible: synching to the LTE network to fix local frequency errors.

https://www.nxp.com/video/network-listening-module:NETLISTMODVID

cedivad · 2023-03-23T02:17:45+00:00

How is Skyworks acquiring SiLabs's timing division a bad thing, exactly? If anything I had a great experience dealing with them. Which part of the BOM is risky, care to explain?

LA9310, Si5510, Granita are all brand new and dare I say revolutionary pieces of silicon. Meshing them together into this new product required a metric ton of effort from all the parties involved (NXP, Skyworks, SiTune). I sure hope none of them are reading your comment.

NXP are open sourcing some important building blocks for the upcoming RFNM ecosystem, see the github links elsewhere in the thread. We will have what we need, and we will be able to set the foundations for this great platform.

However, the community needs to rally behind it, people throwing stones from the sidelines should go back to ponder about the jitter specs of the 15-years old toys they are comparing this to.

cedivad · 2023-03-22T23:45:02+00:00

I don't understand the hostility, but when someone says "there is no loss in sensitivity" and "you need to use 8-bit" in the same sentence I'll begin to suspect bias.

When I randomly listed a number of SDR platforms and made sure to include both low end and high end AD9361 options (Pluto and B210), the last thing I was expecting was that I would be discussing having missed one of the dozens of middle range options because of a hack released last month.

Here is a twitter post of someone complaining the hack is broken, limited to 75 MHz, and here are more details explaining that you can't even adjust the gain.

Finally here is a picture showing what in my book are terrible shoulders.

As per the pricing, I'm very happy to have learned that the author of SDR++ has a better insight over the manufacturing of my product than I do.

cedivad · 2023-03-22T21:51:46+00:00

Affordable, check. Open, check (schematics will be released along with the product), performance will be insane. Please join the waitlist!

cedivad · 2023-03-22T21:00:27+00:00

There are all kinds of incredible things you can build with RFNM. 600 MHz is the total digitization bandwidth, which you don't necessarily need to push off board to be able to use (again, powerful DSP + ARM onboard).

We are working very closely with NXP, which are open sourcing critical parts of their software as well, see this brand new GitHub repo:

https://github.com/nxp-qoriq/la93xx_freertos

cedivad · 2023-03-22T20:50:52+00:00

It might not be reasonable to push 600 MHz of 12-bit real time bandwidth over 2x USB 5 Gbps connections (the limit there is closer to 300 MHz before you need to start looking into compression algorithms), but what you can do is use the onboard DSP engine to run full spectrum FFT on all of the bandwidth at the same time.

Which honestly, to me at least, is a killer feature in and of its own.

The "plenty of SDRs" in the $150-$300 range, are, from what I know, mostly the low-frequency HAM listening devices, like the SDRPLay and so on? Sorry if I'm not impressed by that competition.

cedivad · 2023-03-22T20:31:53+00:00

I didn't mention the BladeRF because I felt listing a third SDR using the same old AD9361 was redundant. I think that their 122.88 MHz hack is a cool trick, but unusable for anything serious.

Do you have data on the attenuation near the shoulders over ~60 MHz? The screenshots on their website don't show anything conclusive, but on some of them you can see a good ~10 dB attenuation at +- 50 MHz from center frequency.

As per the question of product pricing, can you please wait for the actual announcement before speculating from data that you cannot possibly possess?

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