Jetson Nano and Pluto Sdr

[IZ7PDX]

I am interested in Portsdown 4 development with Jetson Nano 4 Gb using Adalm Pluto Sdr as Rf engine. Are there concrete development possibilities now or will there be in the future? What problem will have to be overcome to achieve this configuration?

[g0mjw]

Not stand alone Portsdown 4 - unless you mean with also a Raspberry PI. However it can already be used for DATV. John G7JTT has had success with installing OBS but this is not a powerful CPU and while it can run a desktop, you might be better off with a PC. It has a good, very good, H265 encoding capability which is how it is used with the Portsdown as an encoder.

All you need to do with the Pluto to generate a reduced bandwidth DATV signal anywhere between 70MHz and 6 GHz is install F5OEO's firmware and send it an appropriate transport stream over the network via UDP. The firmware does the rest. The Nano can produce this transport stream, but it uses gstreamer. You either need to install ffmpeg, which is not trivial, or modify the encoding scripts to use gstreamer. That's a lot of work, Dave G8GKQ may have worked on this as part of the PD4 encoding.

Once you have written the code and got it working we will all be interested in your results.

Mike

Edit - here is a link to the forum thread viewtopic.php?f=15&t=6116

[G8GKQ]

Hi Luigi

I do not plan to develop the Jetson software to work with the Pluto.

The basic Portsdown software works with the Pluto by sending it H264 encoded video over RTMP. Evariste's Pluto firmware then formats this as a DVB-S2 transport stream and generates the I and Q signals to drive the Pluto modulator. The RTMP protocol does not support H265, so this method cannot be used for H265 encoding. So, there is no advantage in using a Jetson, as the basic Portsdown can generate reasonable H264.

To drive the Pluto with H265, the Jetson would need to format the H265 encoded video as DVB-S2, and then generate the I and Q drive for the Pluto. Or it could send the Pluto H265 over UDP and use a different version of Evariste's firmware to encode it. This is easily possible, but is not something that I am planning to write and support. I simply have too many projects and not enough time.

It is better for me write and support a few software projects properly, as opposed to writing software projects and then abandoning them.

Dave, G8GKQ

[radiogareth]

Given the recent flood of Surface Pro laptops onto the market (around £150-£200)which will encode H265 natively using DATVEasy direct to Pluto (and other SDRs) its probably not worth messing with a Jetson now, unless you already have one......Surface Pro will also do all sorts of other handy stuff....
Gareth

[IZ7PDX]

Thank you all for your interesting replies.
I imagined that the Jetson Nano coupled with the Raspi4 and an Sdr rtx has interesting potential but I stopped in front of the impossibility of using it with the Pluto Sdr.
I understand Dave that you only intend to develop new projects and condense your little time on more "exciting" developments but it's really a shame to be bound to the exclusive use of the Lime SDR Mini, no longer purchasable (just a prediction of a new version 2 expensive)...
I admire your efforts to make life easier for us Digital ATV enthusiasts and I would like to help you in an important way but my technical programming skills are very limited.
Finally, I inform you that as soon as I get the new Jetson Nano 4G I will combine it with the Portsdown 4 (sacrificing one of the 3 I have) and I will try to understand how to adapt the code to Pluto...
I respect you and all of BATC for all of the interesting activities and projects you do, and for your ability to communicate them to our amateur radio community.... 73 to all, Luigi.