I have been doing quite a bit of research on this lately.
i have used my pi3 with rtl_tcp with rtlsdr devices and it worked pretty good with gqrx.
been messing around with limesdr-mini in the pi3 and its not even easy to get going.
people have said that the pi3 is better at being a soapysdr remote with fedora 64bit as it also was created with armv8 instruction where most other distros are 32bit and backward compatible to the pi which is armv6
one of the problems is it still really limits the samplerate you can put over wifi from the pi3 even if all is working great.
So…i been looking at a ton of SBC’s and reading and reading and watching youtube.
then it dawned on my i can go buy almost any used phone off ebay with snapdragon 800 cpu and usually darn good gpu, plenty of ram (2GB minimum) and sometimes 3 or 4GB (my v30+ had 4GB), USB 3.0 and dual band wifi 2.4/5.0ghz, external storage (sdcard).
anyhow since SoapySDR Server (remote) is not avail in play store or no app offically released like sdrangel then we cant get it yet (hope this really changes soon)
i would 100% be willing to pay for a working sdr app that i can run on the android phone and screen cast to a monitor and use bt m/k.
would be willing to pay for either app (but not avail yet)
ok so it looks like im back to SBC
which one can stream the limesdr data to a client machine running the actual sdr app?
i know we need usb 3.0 and probably 5ghz (dont want the wifi to interfere with the lime mini 3.5GHz cap)
probably need 2GB ram at least
that leave really only a few boards
anybody recommend one for just receiving the msps i want?
i sometimes set my samplerate to 65msps (like with cubicsdr) but thats on my laptop.
im also almost ready to take the plunge and do the “80Mhz bandwidth spectrogram on LimeSDR-mini” 80mhz bandwidth mod.
anyhow what i guess im saying is what SBC will run SoapySDR Server (remote) the best in a headless configuration.
i dont want to have to buy any audio boards. i read one of them had to add an audio board.
when you are headless i dont think you can use the hdmi digital audio so it has to be another onboard audio.
I have the Udoo X86 Ultra. Works great with the full sized Lime. It’s a real Windows or Linux computer, linked with an Arduino.
They have the Udoo Bolt coming out & I have one coming. It’s FAST & has an Arduino, also.
If you want the ultimate SBC for Linux, the NVIDIA Jetpack is about the best you can get.
None of these are cheap, but they are Powerful. Heck, the Udoo X86 Ultra is better than my 7 year old laptop, by far.
These also are very miserly on the power draw, which makes battery power possible.
Well, now that the Udoo Bolt is coming out, there is no question which I would use. The Bolt.
I am using SDR-Console (I am not a coder). I have had the bandwidth set to 50 Mhz for over 24 hours, with Broadcast FM. This is on my Dell 5500 (2-4 core 3.7 Mhz Xeons with 72G of RAM & a 950 GTX card.
When I forst got the Lime, I played with it a bit. Then, got the Udoo & am mounting it in an old mobile computer, with: LimeSDR-USB, RF amp & filtering (RX/TX) from a Yaseu 857, & a bunch of other stuff. It will be a ham radio, when done.
When I get a chance, I will update the Udoo & software to give it a try. If I remember right, I had casually set the bandwidth to 30 Mhz, when testing.
that is some great info there!
thanks alot and very nice setup.
i need to really start studying so i can attend certification class to become a ham.
cant wait for this to happen.
Having an SBC that would allow full power of limesdr usb 3.0 and streaming out over wifi 5ghz would be awesome. now only if my i3-4005u could decode fast enough
8GB ram and ssd.
run both windows 10 64bit and windows ubuntu 18.10 i think im on now.
could the SBC help off load some of the calcs and therefore let the client set higher sample rate and still be able to demodulate fm stereo?
right now i set to about 10msps and can decode clearly with this i3 system
+1 on Udoo x86. Great thing about them is that they also have Intel graphics with OpenCL support, which means that you can run things like gr-fosphor with GPU accelerated DSP.
New Intel NUC looks good. You’d need to compare the specs… Most other things — e.g. including OpenCL support and GPU performance — being equal, Udoo will likely have the edge in terms of GPIO. NUCs usually have some, but Udoo will likely have more and of course has an integrated Arduino compatible microcontroller.
As ever, depends on what you particular requirements are
I’ve used both the Intel NUC and the UDOO advanced (and also a MSI i5 cube PC, and the LattePanda) and any of those would be a great foundation piece for a LimeSDR/LimeSDR-Mini development system for either Windows or Linux. I’ve used ALL those (NUC i3, UDOO Advanced, MSI i5 cube, LattePanda) and all of them perform excellent with the LimeSDR and the LimeSDR-Mini. Frankly, I’m a little fixated on Ed’s (AA7QQ’s) statement about the Bolt and Jetpack…It’s got my research senses tingling again wanting to check out those boards - especially the Jetpack.
That Jetpack will outperform them all. It’s extremely fast (CPU/GPU/RAM communications) for what we need. As far as I know, Linux only.
My next will be the Udoo Bolt.
I’ve used the Pine Rock64 boards on Linux - not the one you sent, but an earlier Pi-alike board that I loaded with Linux and put SDRAngel on it. It drove the Lime fine from that platform and the performance of the Rockchip device was pretty much on par with that of another SBC I have - The ASUS Tinkerboard. They both performed similarly in side by side tests. But I will check out this new Pine and see what the specs (and price) are…Stay tuned…
Are you referring to the Jetson TX2 from NVIDIA? I can’t find anything on the Jetpack so if you have a link on that, let me know. I am interested in reviewing the specs on that board.
The UDOO Bolt appears to be about a third faster (if you can imagine such things) as an Intel NUC i7 (which on its own is pretty speedy). When that busts loose for production I’ll be in line - appears its crowdfunding now with a December ship date (which are notoriously late all the time). I can’t complain with the UDOO Advanced board I have - it’s been pretty solid and it ran Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) real well with SDRAngel driving the Lime. So I’m certain that the Bolt could drive the Lime even better - - The Advanced didn’t seem to have any trouble keeping up, so the Bolt will be just that much better.
Keep me advised on the Jetpack - I would like to see what that’s about…God knows I have a lot of time to look this over before I start spending greenback on it from what the market looks like.
Yeah, Jetpack is the developer software. There is a TX-2 on a proto board (Similar to a Udoo) that just rocks. We are testing it for positioning in automation (We fly about 90% of the people in the world). Our Code Monkey is playing with it daily & he hates Linux. But, when I showed him the specs, he ordered one overnight. He says it’s the best thing since the IBM PC.
For me, and this goes directly to the use of the LimeSDR, it’s important how well the SBC - of any kind - is set up to interface directly with the LimeSDR. Granted, the RockPro64 may have better features in the PCI-e but how it compares in other areas (computing speed, graphics capability, storage capacity, compatibility with other OSs, interfaces, built-in features (like Arduino), ect get my attention over specific features (like PCI-e). Right now I have short list of SBCs that are on the horizon to be used with my Lime when I get the transceiver functionality designed the way I want it and how it will hook up to the candidate SBC. Jetson TX-2 is on that short list but others may invade on that - I’m ruling nothing out for now.
