Radioberry for sale at aliexpress

[Steve Haynal]

Hi Group,

The radioberry is a fork of the Hermes-Lite with the intent of tight integration with a Raspberry Pi. You can now buy an assembled radioberry from vendors on aliexpress:

https://groups.google.com/g/radioberry/c/Hymzdw4wqLM/m/9cPxphzZAQAJ

Just to remind people of the differences, the radioberry does not have a TX RF preamp, 5W amp, gigabit ethernet, or filters. It needs add on boards to be a complete radio. It also has limited bandwidth between radioberry and raspberry pi. But PA3GSB has done some very interesting things with the radioberry. The RX frontend is identical to the HL2 so you should expect similar RX performance. PA3GSB took the gateware modifications I made for 4kHz receivers plus Pavel's fast FT8 decoder and set up a standalone 8-band FT8 skimmer:

https://groups.google.com/g/radioberry/c/DwKudsh9UMc/m/DT-5R0RnBQAJ

For around $100 total, this is probably one of the best solutions for multiband RX-only skimming.

73,

Steve

kf7o

[Roger David Powers]

I'm very interested, but have some questions.

I see six different products on offer, how to decide which one is best?

What else is needed to make it into the 8 band FT8 skimmer?    Seems you get a RPi, plug this in the GPIO pins, plug in the antenna, good to go.

RPi3b or RPi4b for the base system, how much RAM?

Maybe I'll write a user manual, lol.

Wish I knew about this before I bought my 2nd HL2, this is pretty much what I was thinking I'd like to do with it, yet having a spare full-blown HL2 is a good thing as well.

Might buy this while it is available and put it into my winter projects pile.

Regards,
RDP

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[keyboa...@gmail.com]

What's the maximum bandwidth for the receivers? Depending on gateware configuration? It might be nice with OpenWebRX. 

73,

Jayson

AA7NM

[ron.ni...@gmail.com]

For those in the U.S., it appears that Amazon might have these in stock next week:

 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B093DKS25C 

higher price, but possibly faster shipping and easier returns/refunds if any of the boards turn out to be not fully functional.  Add a Pi 4 for a very compact Rx only (and bench signal generator) HL2-like system.

73,

Ron

n6ywu

On Tuesday, May 25, 2021 at 10:14:57 PM UTC-7 softerh...@gmail.com wrote:

[Steve Haynal]

Hi All,

To answer some of the questions, I think you will want a Raspberry Pi 4 for best performance. RAM is not as important for skimming. You can find some bandwidth performance data in these threads:

https://groups.google.com/g/radioberry/c/_Ub2KMf0XCU/m/304G-v8MBgAJ

https://groups.google.com/g/hermes-lite/c/At-Olx59LBA/m/1e4tgxOQCAAJ

All 6 AliExpress vendors are selling the same thing.

73,

Steve

kf7o

[Robert Nickels]

On 5/28/2021 12:41 AM, Steve Haynal wrote:
> I think you will want a Raspberry Pi 4 for best performance.

I agree.   The links you posted seem to bear out the performance
expectations outlined here:

https://github.com/pa3gsb/Radioberry-2.x/wiki/Radioberry-performance

Two receivers, 96kHz, with the DSP running on the same Pi is the
expectation.   Johan does mention that an improvement to his present
polling scheme has been in the wish-list queue and since the Pi is
keeping pretty busy polling the GPIO if a kernel mode interrupt-based
handler can be developed that should enable improved performance.    My
guess is the audio breakups you heard are a result of the CPU running
out of cycles from doing all the polling.

My opinion - it's not the Pi 4 that's the gating item but the lack of a
kernel mode driver.

73, Bob W9RAN

["Christoph v. Wüllen"]

The radioberry stuff should be very interesting to look at
also for the rest of us, since along these lines
programming for the next-generation FPGAs will go, which
have a (sort of) ARM CPU on-the-chip. You can also compare
this with the RedPitayas.

I personally find it extremely convenient to do the
communication (Ethernet etc.) with the PC in a normal
Linux style. The immediate PRO of such a design is
that you have e.g. speed negotiation on the Ethernet
for free (with the RedPitaya, you run P1 at 1GBit
if you want).

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>

[Robert Nickels]

On 5/28/2021 12:13 PM, "Christoph v. Wüllen" wrote:
> I personally find it extremely convenient to do the
> communication (Ethernet etc.) with the PC in a normal
> Linux style. The immediate PRO of such a design is
> that you have e.g. speed negotiation on the Ethernet
> for free (with the RedPitaya, you run P1 at 1GBit
> if you want).

Well, USB 3.0 has transmission speeds of up to 5 Gbit/s, about ten times
faster than USB 2.0 (0.48 Gbit/s) which is already half of gig
ethernet.   The Pi has two USB 3.0 ports so why not use it and avoid the
complications of ethernet?    High speed device-to-device communication
is what USB was designed for.

73,  Bob W9RAN

[Steve Haynal]

Hi All,

I said the radioberry RX frontend is the same as the HL2 but that is not exactly true. The frontend LPF on the HL2 and radioberry RX path are the same, but most HL2 users have the N2ADR filter board which has a HPF to block AM. Jim, N2ADR, found that blocking AM had the biggest bang for the buck to prevent ADC  overload. I do find the HPF very helpful. At my remote station, I need to have it on most of the time. One could add a similar external HPF to the radioberry if needed.

73,

Steve

kf7o

[Ramakrishnan Muthukrishnan]

A friend of mine, Deepu Augustin VU3TLD has designed and built an N2ADR compatible filters for radioberry, stackable on radioberry/raspberry pi board combo. 

73

Ram VU3RDD

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[keyboa...@gmail.com]

OK I was curious. I've now got one running into an old i7 laptop with SparkSDR so I can run a deeper skim on 4 tuners at 96kHz. This doesn't strain the Pi too much. Running Spark on the Pi itself would limit the decoding I can do with the available bandwidth. It'd be great if the efficiency of the GPIO interface could be improved. I hooked it up to my 400 foot horizontal loop though an "AM distill" high pass filter I had and that helps a lot. It does lack some of the RF gain control on receive compared to the full Hermes. I haven't experimented with transmitting yet but I imagine with some filtering I could WSPR with just the Radioberry's output. I may also try some of the experimental gateware as I get time.

It just shows up on the network as another HL2 as far as software is concerned. It's a great upgrade to the RTLSDR band-hopping WSPR receiver I was running and can now add FT8 and more. I'd say it's sort of an "ultra-lite" Hermes. It'll be interesting to see if some of the other filter and amplifier hats appear for sale as well. It could make a compact and portable setup. Thanks for the tip!

73,

Jayson

AA7NM

[Roger David Powers]

> On Monday, June 14, 2021, 12:30:39 PM EDT, keyboa...@gmail.com <keyboa...@gmail.com> wrote:

> OK I was curious. I've now got one running into an old i7 laptop with SparkSDR so I can run a deeper skim on 4 tuners at 96kHz. This doesn't strain the Pi too much. Running Spark on the Pi itself would limit the decoding I can do with the available bandwidth. It'd be great if the efficiency of the GPIO interface could be improved. 

I'm still fascinated by this.

Why is skimming across 96 kHz better?

It seems the GPIO interface is the bottleneck for Radioberry, presumably using a HL2 with its gigabit ethernet interface would work better?

I have seen the writeups with CW skimmer on Windows, but am wondering if anyone has gone through the effort of trying Pavel's FT8 decoders on Raspberry Pi with the eight receiver firmware on HL2?

Is the source code for the CW skimmer module for HL2 available?

I've read some of the apps are finding using more than 2 receivers is a problem, is that an issue with the protocol we use, or just because the apps were not designed with so many receivers in mind?

Is there a wireshark plugin for HL2's protocol?

Regards,

RDP

[Steve Haynal]

Hi RDP,

I think 96kHz skimming is desirable when using SparkSDR as SparkSDR creates virtual receivers within this bandwidth to skim several modes, FT8/JT9/PSK. Ideally you want all the bandwidth to skim all possible signals and modes.

Yes, the HL2 gigabit allows for skimming 10 bands at 192kHz bandwidth. There is limited filtering with that gateware so only about 80-90 kHz is usable, but enough for most digital portions of a band.

I have never seen the CW skimmer source code.

We have used Pavel's FT8 decoder both with the HL2 and RadioBerry. See this post:

https://groups.google.com/g/radioberry/c/DwKudsh9UMc/m/DT-5R0RnBQAJ

The protocol we used, basically extended openhpsdr1 supports up to 12 receivers. Some apps may not be able to support that many.

Yes there is a wireshark plugin. Search for openhpsdr hermes-lite wireshark on google. 

https://github.com/matthew-wolf-n4mtt/openhpsdr-u

73,

Steve

kf7o

[Steve Haynal]

Hi Group,

Here is a cross post I made to the RadioBerry group which may be of interest to those on this list too.

Hi Group,

I recently saw this upcoming Raspberry Pi SDR shield:

https://www.crowdsupply.com/cariboulabs/cariboulite

It uses the Rasbperry Pi's secondary memory interface for higher bandwidth, something I always wanted to try.

"The 4MSPS I/Q samples (both Tx and Rx) are transmitted over the RPI’s secondary memory interface, where CaribouLite acts as a high throughput memory peripheral."

The IQ samples are each at least 13bit/13bit, so at 4MSPS they must be realizing 26*4 = just over 100 Mbs. 

The project is fully open source:

https://github.com/cariboulabs/cariboulite

Maybe the RadioBerry could leverage and reuse this existing work on the secondary memory interface? The github page says bandwidths of up to 500 Mbs are possible on some RPis.

73,

Steve

kf7o

[keyboa...@gmail.com]

That's interesting to know Steve. The biggest problem I'm seeing is the current GPIO overhead means significant loading of the Pi's processors by other applications will interfere with the interface and lead to dropped samples. I'm not experienced with the needs involved so the practicality of making improvements is unknown. But if that could be fixed you could probably run the whole thing on the same Pi. The amount of RAM on the Pi only seems to matter for what applications you have. I've actually switched to running SparkSDR on another Raspberry Pi 4 over Ethernet, and it has no trouble decoding WSPR,FT8,PSK-31 and JT9 at the same time from the 4 receivers. That helps with power consumption for sure.

And Robert, like Steve said running the receivers at 96 kHz allows me to have multiple virtual receivers within them for WSPR, FT8, PSK31 and JT9 as they are all close enough in frequency to the range covered by the sample rate. It gives them all a big enough receiver window. It could be smaller if I was only decoding one mode. I can also alternatively get a single 384 KHz stream from it in SDRConsole so I'm happy with that. It doesn't have the full bandwidth of the HL2's Ethernet interface but works well otherwise. There may be room for improvement.

Jayson

AA7NM

[keyboa...@gmail.com]

And that's Rodger, not Robert. So much for spellcheck. 

-Jayson

[Roger David Powers]

Some follow-on questions...

>  We have used Pavel's FT8 decoder both with the HL2 and RadioBerry. See this post:

https://groups.google.com/g/radioberry/c/DwKudsh9UMc/m/DT-5R0RnBQAJ

> 

> The protocol we used, basically extended openhpsdr1 supports up to 12 receivers. Some apps may not be able to support that many.

Ok, following the radioberry link to http://pavel-demin.github.io/red-pitaya-notes/sdr-transceiver-ft8/ I see the main use case of Pavel's FT8 decoder is to use the CPU to pull samples from the radio, write the samples to a file (236000 complex 32 bit samples gathered at 4000 samples per second), then run his decoder over the file.   

It's not clear if this is a physical file, or if a shared memory segment is being used.

Which app is being used on HL2 to gather these samples?  This would be the software that needs to use the extended protocol you mention above to access up to 12 receivers, and presumably write them to a file or shared memory segment.

> Yes there is a wireshark plugin. Search for openhpsdr hermes-lite wireshark on google. 

> https://github.com/matthew-wolf-n4mtt/openhpsdr-u

Ok, I have not built my own wireshark plugins yet but the documentation looks solid, I'll give it a try soon.

Regards,

RDP

.

[Steve Haynal]

Hi RDP,

The code to use Pavel's decoder is at:

https://github.com/softerhardware/Hermes-Lite2/tree/master/software/ft8

It is very experimental code. It is not file based but uses ZeroMQ for communication between several computers. The intent is to decode many combinations of IQ signals from two coherent radios to do on-the-fly beamforming in all directions. See this post and thread:

 https://groups.google.com/g/hermes-lite/c/FYS15G-tWhs/m/tC_05ZGRCAAJ

73,

Steve

kf7o

[Roger David Powers]

Ahh, okay!  I had read the beam forming thread but hadn't made the mental leap that its code could also be used for experimenting with multi band skimming too.  I like the zMQ approach.  I haven't used it myself but zMQ is also integrated into gnuradio.  I was kinda struggling with how to do the plumbing.  It seemed the files based approach would not work well on a raspberry pi which is often IO limited.  

I think I'll try to get the code you pointed me to running with the default firmware and one RX, then incrementally add a 2nd RX, then switch firmware and shoot for the moon.  That's the plan for now.  Let me know if that makes sense to you.

I did get the wireshark plugin built with no issues, thanks for the pointer.

Regards,

RDP

[keyboa...@gmail.com]

Just FYI.


RADIOBERRY HF SDR TRANSCEIVER PI HAT - IT'S BACK!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kt7jA0T12E8

On Tuesday, May 25, 2021 at 10:14:57 PM UTC-7 softerh...@gmail.com wrote:

[Steve Haynal]

I read somewhere that there was a PCB change not by the original creator which removed the inner ground planes. This is contrary to what the AD9866 datasheet recommends. I am curious to hear what effect if any that has on noise.

73,

Steve

kf7o