Thanks this was very insightful, I'm an early stage RF engineer and have been working on analogue RF, I have built a DDS using micro's for one of my projects and it works wonderfully, the learning curve for FPGA seems daunting but if the future looks like "hardware" defined "digital" RF I may start picking this up.
FPGA are necessary when you want to implement direct sampling SDR's (as a hobbyist) there are several examples on github which are quite successful. But as amateur radio designer you need to learn a complete new skillset. Also making the design cost effective is not so easy. A lot of cheap ADC chips are older and difficult to obtain. I have some AD9963 which are dual channel 100 MSPS and I was searching for an cost effective FPGA that can connect to USB or PCIe but most chips are expensive and designing a BGA pcb is also a challenge, or use a dev board but those mostly don't have enough IO's to connect the AD converter or are from a signal integrity point of view poor. So maybe I take an existing SDR board (like radioberry) and adapt it.Thanks for the video interesting discussion.
Hi Paul, your points are valid, buy hey someone has to do it. Where some people see barriers others are seeing new opportunities and challenges. Thanks for the great comment.!
Hello! I thought about full digital radios - there must be an excellent ADC: to avoid intermodulation distortion and noise.Maybe down-sampling helps to avoid extremely expensive 16bit ADC 60MSPS. My history about program logic was sad. I know the C language, microcontrollers , analog RF electronics. Several years ago I tried to write some software for FPGA. It was a simple serial interface for external ADC and DAC and a simple bass filter. It takes several days (I had done it) - but I was there so exhausted that I had a sleepless night... As a result I sold my FPGA Altera developer board.
Andrew, I think you are made from the right material, I had many of those ups/downs. For audio applications FPGAs are overkill but for high sample rates and more complicated stuff are working like a charm. I hope you get back to it someday. Take it Easy!
