[sparky]

Man it'd be nice if this (or BladeRF) went down to DC like the USRP, so you could also use it as an oscilloscope. It's easier on the USRP because of its motherboard/daughterboard architecture, which adds some cost and complexity, but the cost adder should be pretty small relative to the several-hundred-dollars these things cost.

[SigmundA]

Yeah I am annoyed at the separation in SDR hardware most seem to be 0-30Mhz or 30Mhz and up.

HackRf is even offering a Ham-it-up upconverter to go with, the same one you would use with a DVB-T dongle. This gets you into the lower range but uses a mechanical switch to engage. Would really like soft control of it and be more integrated into the design. I might even try to wire a relay in to a Ham-it-up along with a raspberry pi for a integrated device that can go below 30Mhz with IP based connection.

[xradionut]

That's the nature of the RF business. Most folks are interested in one (<= HF), or the other (> HF), or have money for equipment that handles both. Building good equipment that handles the full spectrum is challenging.

[nanospider]

http://thinkrf.com/wsa5000/

[patrickyeon]

Building that one was challenging too (I used to do RF work for thinkRF). Going back through history, they started off with something that would only cover a specific band (say wifi, or specific cell bands). Then we did the 0440 (400MHz-4GHz), then the 0108 (10MHz-8GHz). There are all kinds of difficulties that come in to making and RF front-end that'll cover all of that bandwidth (we also did amplification and filtering to get better quality reception).

You'll also note the prices, and that those are receive-only devices. Some of the reason the price is so high is that we did all the RF design in-house, designing to our specs. A lot of the cheaper boards out there have less amplification, no (or too little) filtering, and use an integrated LO/mixer/digitizer/baseband chip, which limits them to the specs that chip can handle.

[xradionut]

I wonder how hard it would be to modify PyRF for another SDR?

[patrickyeon]

That's all stuff that happened after I left, but I would bet "not hard at all", if you can implement a controller that presents the same API as https://github.com/pyrf/pyrf/blob/master/pyrf/devices/thinkr...

[patrickyeon]

The reason a fair number of these don't go down to DC is that they have an integrated mixer and ADC/DAC, so they are limited to what that one chip will do for front-end bandwidth.