I am very happy to report that the FPGA open source DVB-S modulator project is making excellent progress.
Today, it demonstrated real time conversion of Transport Stream data into DVB-S compatible QPSK while running at 4M sym/sec.
Hardware platform is a DE0-nano attached to a DigiLite-ZL modulator (http://www.idesignz.org/DigiLiteZL/DigiLiteZL.htm). 4% of the FPGA is used by the modulator design, so there is a little bit of room left
TS was fed from a win32 platform via USB into an FT2232H USB to FIFO convertor, which in turn feeds the EP4CE22F17C6 FPGA.
Development was done using the free Altera Quartus II development environment, and the DE0-nano was purchased from Digikey for around US$79.
I wish to congratulate Ben, the FPGA designer as well as to thank the many people who have contributed to this project so far.
Further details will become available in due course
Regards,
Mark Atherton, ZL3JVX
markaren10@yahoo,com
21 Oct 2011, New Zealand