Wednesday 13 March 2013

DATV-Express has landed

Just a quick note to let you all know that I now have the prototype
to play with.

It covers 72.5 MHz to 2.48 GHz with about 60 mW output.
The fractional PLL is considerably cleaner than the previous board,
which shows how critical grounding is!

I had it transmitting DVB-S and DVB-S2 today a couple of hours after
Parcelforce delivered the box. I am very happy with it so far.

I have a considerable amount of work to do on the FPGA code next,
mainly to make it as flexible as possible on symbol rates. I am sure we
will have something to show to people later in the year.

Art will soon start building another board, we currently have enough
parts to make 4 boards.

3 comments:

  1. Always nice when a first article lights up properly, especially a hand assembled one.

    Mike
    KM7MH

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  2. Well done to all so far so good Charles

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  3. Yes the board is looking good so far. I have just started on some FPGA code to implement a programmable symbol rate generator using the Cordic algorithm. If it works we will be able to get rid of the expensive Si570 chip. I have the FPGA mimicking an I2C slave so I can send commands from the host to alter the FPGAs DSP routines on the fly.

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