One step closer to getting a decent signal out

I finally got a response from my local council about erecting a
proper mast for my DATV activities. The council in fact replied
to me about a month ago but the letter appears to have got lost
in the post. The view of the planning officer is that they are likely
to grant me permission as the plans are in line with the local
development plan and the structure is not excessive. It is likely
that the mast will have to be retracted when not in use as a
condition of the permission.

One slight fly in the ointment is that they will require a
"Telecommunications - Supplementary information" form to
be submitted with the application. This appears to be a
document design for cellphone antennas and asks many
questions which are not applicable to Amateur Radio.
Including whether I have coordinated my installation with
others operators, expected coverage maps, technical reasons
for the site selection and a load of other similar information.
I am trying to clarify with the local council if they really do need
this form with the application or whether they are just practising
a tick-box methodology.

A few steps forward and a few steps back

First the good news, I now have 3.125 and 4.167 M Symbols per sec
working for DVB-S. Those are used by the Columbus Ohio TV repeater.

I have also been working on designing a four output switch mode power
supply. I am trying to just use parts from my junk box so the design does
not use any specialist chips just a load of op-amps. The original idea was
that it would take a 13.8v input and supply 12v, 10v 5v and -12v. That has
now changed and the PSU will probably produce 18v for my old laptop,
6v for the SDR, 5v for the MPEG encoder and 12v for the PA. Whether
I will be brave enough to trust a load of expensive equipment with my
SMPSU build on Veroboard is another matter!

Now for the bad news.

I have added code for 8 MHz and 6 MHz DVB-T channels, sadly the
interpolation and decimation ratios means that the processor
load has gone up considerably, unless I can find a way of reducing this
I am stuck. This is all due to the USRP2 having a fixed sample rate and
any weird rates have to get to that rate through interpolation and decimation.
The 7 Mhz version of DVB-T works well but that does not need the high
ratios that the others do.

The person that was going to supply me with a PA for 3.4 GHz is no
longer able to find it so it looks like I may have to go back to plan B which
is to use some of the pHEMTs I have to design a suitable amplifier.