For over a decade, software-defined radio (SDR) has been viewed as a potentially revolutionary means of communications. In principle, SDR would allow a single hardware design to support communications across a variety of formats, protocols, and frequencies, including GSM, LTE, MIMO, and more. Indeed, many digital chips have been put forward to handle the logic functions of the SDR scheme. What’s been missing is an easy way to implement the necessary analog functionality… until last year.
Formally introduced by Analog Devices last October, the $175 70-MHz-to-6-GHz AD9361 RF Agile Transceiver integrates an RF front end, flexible mixed-signal baseband section, frequency synthesizers, two analog-to-digital converters, and two direct conversion receivers. With its high level of integration, this highly programmable device simplifies design and reduces bill-of-material cost, while at the same offering the widest dynamic range available, with state-of-the-art noise figure and linearity. The extremely flexible transceiver can be configured for experiments and evaluation of signals in FM and TV broadcast reception, prototyping a GSM base station with OpenBTS, developing GNU Radio GPS/WiFi/ISM, and more.
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