General radio related questions/How to use MyriadRF

Hi all, I’m a member of a university robotics team that is exploring radio usage for communication between our systems. Our understanding of radio is, basic, to say the least. The problem is that we’re having trouble even knowing where to start. Basically right now we’re trying to understand how we might put together a custom radio system for hooking up two computers. If you’re interested in the rationale for why we can’t just do adhoc wifi or something similar, see the following paragraph. If you don’t need such rationale, basically we’re wondering how to start. Assuming we have a MyriadRF card, or two cards I suppose, any suggestions on what we need to learn in order to actually make use of the two cards?

We’ve done some preliminary research based off of our requirements, the robot is intended to be driven out doors at some distance, say hundreds of meters away from where the base station would be. Based on this we’d want a lower frequency system, in the hundreds of MHz range instead of GHz like with most current wifi devices. Based on FCC regs I believe we’re restricted to 900MHz as that is the lowest band that the FCC allows unlicensed devices. If anyone notices any mistakes yet, please, let me know. The thing that we’re grappling with right now, or at least one of, is that the 900MHz 11ac wifi devices are just coming onto market while the spec itself I don’t believe has been formalized yet. So while an off the shelf solution that allowed two computers to talk to each other and transmit data would be nice, we’re not holding our breath here and we’re willing to roll up our sleeves to learn how to do it ourselves.

Hi zwabbit,

You can use BladeRF board made by Nuand company [link]. It is a software defined radio (SDR) platform, based on LMS6002D + FPGA + USB3 interface. I’ve seen this platform doing GSM calls. They might made it working with WiFi standard as well. I suggest you contact them to figure out. But having this two platforms you will be able to establish communication between two PC.

I hope this helps
Rich