DATV-Express Project - September update report

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KenW6HHC
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Joined: Mon Jun 01, 2009 4:20 pm

DATV-Express Project - September update report

Post by KenW6HHC » Sun Oct 01, 2017 3:10 am

Art WA8RMC reports that as of 9/27/2017 the DATV-Express boards have sold out and are no longer available until the project team decides if we want to make another production run. If you want a board, send a message to support@datv-express.com and we will put your name on the list of those hams wanting boards. The PayPal BUY button has been removed from the PURCHASE NOW page on the DATV-Express.com web site. Two new DATV products are getting ready to appear on the market. The Analog Devices ADALM-PLUTO SDR Tx/Rx may become available again in first week in January at a price of US$100 or US$150. The Lime-Micro mini-LimeSDR Tx/Rx is rumored to ship in mid-January at a price of US$140. Both of these new SDR boards will be lower priced than the DATV-Express Tx-only board (US$300).

Charles G4GUO continues to clean up reported bugs and try to improve performance with the early PLUTO-Express software for the Analog Devices ADALM-PLUTO SDR board as a modulator. An early-experimental alpha-release, v1.25p4 (based on the normal DATV-Express v1.25 software), has just been posted to the DOWNLOADS page of the http://www.DATV-Express.com website. This alpha-release corrects the RB-DATV wide-spectrum-“haystack” bug with DVB-S protocol reported by Brian G4EWJ on the BATC Forum. G4GUO explains the problem was caused by “math overflow” into one of the PLUTO buffers. The v1.25p4 software also corrects some bugs that prevented the hardware-abstraction-layer from allowing the user from switching between the PLUTO modulator and the DATV-Express modulator.
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the PLUTO-Express software currently has a hardware selection menu to select between PLUTO board and DATV-Express board

Charles has determined that the limitation of the PLUTO Tx sample rate of around 4.2 MSymb/sec is apparently caused by limitations in the USB2 data throughput rate on the SDR board design. The Rx sampling rate can be set to 50 MSymb/sec for “waterfall” displays because the USB-induced dropouts are not “visible” in the waterfall. Tx USB-induced video dropouts are easily apparent.
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the PLUTO-Express v1.25p4 software produces a nice 2.2 MS/s DVB-S2 sig from PLUTO board for MiniTiouner analyzer

In addition, Charles provided two YouTube videos that were posted by BATC from the CAT17 convention in September. The main presentation was a talk about his testing of the PLUTO SDR. A second video was the Q&A session at the end of his main presentation on PLUTO. These sessions can be watched on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUWLnU ... CFd93tnBzw

Finally, Art WA8RMC reports that the PCB layout files for the MiniTiouner-Express version of the MiniTiouneV2 board design are just about completed by Tom WB6P. The intent is to produce a smaller and assembled and tested version of the Serit NIM PCBA design at an affordable price.


“Project speed set to slow” …. de Ken W6HHC

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