GFK's Palace

Here are places to get more infos about the USRP:
http://comsec.com/wiki?UniversalSoftwareRadioPeripheral
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuradio/doc/exploring-gnuradio.html#usrp

Another nice thing with this new SDR is that it can receive and decode over-the-air HDTV signals. Even before the broadcast flag becomes mandatory for HDTV receivers, it can be bypassed with the software decoding of the HDTV signal. The broadcast flag is a code sent with the HDTV signal that is supposed to disable the recording of copyrighted works.
See http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuradio/hdtv-samples.html

For people wondering about this SDR and why it's so great, I put some quotes below from a slashdot.org discussion. The entire discussion, including all the usual conspiracy theories that "the government won't allow this" and "the Hollywood industry is controlling Washington" can be read at: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/27/1341221

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by stienman (51024) on 27.12.2004 15:30 (#11193892)
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Of the set of problems in the world that can be solved using software only, hardware only, or a mix of the two, problems are generally moving toward the software solving side.

In other words, radio can be completely received, down converted, and demodulated in hardware and by and large this is how it is done.

However, if you instead receive and downconvert the radio signal, then you can let software take over for the demodulation, and in the case of HDTV further digital decoding.

Further, this device can work on about 32MHz of the signal spectrum at a time. This doesn't mean much until you realize that the entire FM radio band (88.1MHz - 107.9MHz) fits within that slice of bandwidth. You can use this radio to decode the entire audio of all the radio stations in the area simultaneously. Live in detroit? Listen to and record every single radio station with one device. Not so terribly useful for the consumer, but nice for the re-streamer, radio fanatic, FCC, NSA, etc.

Bandwidth of an NTSC TV signal is about 6MHz. Watch/record 4-5 consecutive channels simultaneously.

HDTV is about 8MHz. Watch and record 3-4 consecutive channels simultaneously.

In short, it's a move from less hardware to more softare. The biggest advantage is not less hardware, but more flexibility. This one tuner can be used to tune your HDTV, TV, radio, 802.11, bluetooth, etc.
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by pe1chl (90186) on 27.12.2004 15:27 (#11193865)
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The device is mainly a fast analog-to-digtal and digital-to-analog converter, with USB interface.
It allows you to quickly readout a couple of analog signals using a PC, and to generate some analog signals under program control.

With some additional radio hardware (supplied on daughterboards) you can convert a certain frequency band into analog signals that are then fed to the converters. With proper software you can use this as a radio that does not have a tuning knob but can be tuned in software and/or to receive an entire radio frequency band and process all the signals in parallel.

For example, you can draw a picture of the signal strength for each frequency, plot this versus time. Or you could write software that receives all FM stations in your area simultaneously and converts their broadcasts to streaming audio channels.
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by Animats (122034) on 27.12.2004 13:36 (#11192912)
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This could be valuable for high-bandwidth instrumentation applications. Wideband data-acquisition cards tend to be both overpriced and out of date, because the product volumes are small.

Some years ago, I was doing some work on a laser rangefinder, and got to the point where I needed about $20K in test gear to find out why it wasn't working right. Something like this would have been a big help.

Radio hams will find uses for this. It should be great for working on new data transmission schemes for high-noise links, like HF.
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