The USRP under 1.5X Magnifying Lens!

By: Firas Abbas Hamza

Rev 1.0 Last updated: 11-Jun-2008

This document is dedicated to GNURADO Community (especially the developing team) and is considered as part of GNU Radio project.

GNU Radio is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3, or (at your option) any later version. GNU Radio is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with GNU Radio. If not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.

 

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Table of Contents

References.........................................................................................................................................3 Words Must Be Said.........................................................................................................................3 Starting Notes....................................................................................................................................4 USRP.................................................................................................................................................5 ADC Section.................................................................................................................................6 DAC Section.................................................................................................................................6 Auxiliary Input/Output Analog Channels:....................................................................................7 Auxiliary Digital I/O Ports:..........................................................................................................7 FPGA............................................................................................................................................7 Daughterboards...........................................................................................................................11 Basic TX/RX Daughterboards................................................................................................11 Low Frequency TX/RX Daughterboards................................................................................11 TVRX Daughterboards...........................................................................................................12 DBSRX Daughterboards.........................................................................................................12 RFX Daughterboards..............................................................................................................12 Troubleshooting..........................................................................................................................12 Power..........................................................................................................................................12 General Questions...........................................................................................................................13 FPGA Verilog Questions................................................................................................................20 AD9862 Codec Questions...............................................................................................................26 Controlling FPGA Registers Questions..........................................................................................28 Digital Down Converter Questions.................................................................................................30 Digital UP Converter Questions.....................................................................................................35 Digital I/O Pins Control Questions.................................................................................................39 Daughterboards Questions..............................................................................................................44 C++ Interfacing Questions..............................................................................................................52 RSSI Measurement Questions........................................................................................................68 Motherboard Re-Clocking Questions.............................................................................................70 Loading FPGA Bit Stream Questions.............................................................................................73 Timing Latency Questions..............................................................................................................75 USB Controller FX2 Questions......................................................................................................77

 

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References

The following references have being used to write this document. - Gnuradio Mailing archives. - Gnuradio wiki website. - www.ettus.com - Dawei Shen tutorials. - USRP User and Developer’s Guide document. - MSc Thesis “Design of a hardware platform for narrow-band Software Defined Radio applications” by Kalen Watermeyer - www.gps-sdr.com - USRP used Integrated Circuits Datasheets.

Words Must Be Said

- The Gnuradio mailing list is a treasure and some mailing list answers should be gold weighted. - Please send feedback corrections for any technical mistakes especially those labeled by #FIXME# - Gnuradio is great and impressive project and the USRP is an amazing device. I always ask my self, how they build this great project? We’ll never know the answer.