Demo Video of FUNcube Dongle Pro+

6 Responses to Demo Video of FUNcube Dongle Pro+

1. Derek says:

   October 2, 2012 at 12:32 pm

   Looking forward to the release date, hope you will let me know
   • admin says:

     October 3, 2012 at 12:59 pm

     Hello Derek

     We are due for mid October if all goes well with assembly and conformance testing.

     Many thanks, Howard
2. Greg says:

   October 3, 2012 at 9:57 pm

   Hi Howard,
   Given the 192kHz BW, I was thinking about whether it would be possible to concurrently run a few of these as a multi-band sdr using PA3FWM server software. Are multiple instances of the hid and usb audio device able to be supported for that? If not now how about in a future version of the firmware?

   Also on my wish list – a faster codec implemented in fpga or DSpic to give 1-2MHz BW, probably need ethernet for that though? USB audio should be able to do up to 500kHz with the 16 bit samples?

   Cheers
   Greg
   • admin says:

     October 4, 2012 at 11:47 pm

     Hello Greg

     Yes, you can run multiple devices but you need to take care when setting them up. Most software isn’t smart enough to differentiate between FCDs though. I intend to have in place a serial numbering scheme for FCDs to more easily support this.

     Regarding the use of Ethernet, that is possible but it’s a whole different ball game: don’t forget that the FCD was always designed to be plug-and-play from a hardware perspective with minimal wiring to configure. There’s frequently little benefit to using dsPICs to PIC32s for DSP in my opinion.

     The limiting factor for USB audio 1.0 is the 1023 bytes per millisecond frame size limit of isochronous endpoints. Remember it’s quadrature too, so it’s actually 32 bits/sample.

     But also some versions of Windows, for example, only support up to 200ksps for audio.

     Then there’s the ADC: if you need higher sampling rates you’ll need to pick a potentially expensive ADC especially if you want 16 bits or more. The beauty of using audio ADCs is that they oversample many times more than the sampling rate, making the anti-aliasing filters simple and cheap to design. Most higherrate ADCs tend not to be oversampling units so there’s going to be an expense of figuring out some meaty anti-aliasing filters.

     Add to the mix that most SDR software understands standard audio rates such as 192kHz out of the box.

     Many thanks, Howard
3. Greg K says:

   October 10, 2012 at 11:40 pm

   Howard,

   Great demo, can you tell me what vertical antenna you are using in the demo?

   Thanks
   • admin says:

     October 12, 2012 at 8:25 am

     Hi Greg

     I am using an HVU-8, mounted directly outisde my kitchen window right on the balcony railings, not elevated, with about 6m of RG-58 to the dongle.

     Many thanks, Howard