The FreeSRP SDR is now Seeking Crowd Funding on CrowdSupply
Back in August of 2016 we posted about Lukas Lao Beyer’s work in creating a software defined radio from scratch. His goal was to design something that fit somewhere in between the $300 HackRF and the higher end and more pricey USRP radios. Back then he had completed the design and had a working prototype.
Now the Lukas has put the FreeSRP up on CrowdSupply, a crowd funding website. The FreeSRP is priced at $420 each and the goal is to raise $75,000 in order to begin a manufacturing run of the SDR. At the time of writing this post, the campaign has been running for a day at is already 8% funded.
The FreeSRP has a tuning range from 70 MHz to 6 GHz, uses a 12-bit ADC with a sampling rate of up to 61.44 MSPS, and has a maximum analog filter bandwidth of 56 MHz. It is a full-duplex radio (can transmit & receive at the same time). The main chip in the unit is the fairly expensive (~$150 USD) AD9364 integrated RF transceiver chip and it also comes with a Xilinx Artix 7 FPGA. Furthermore the hardware and code is entirely open source.
The specs seem somewhat similar to the cheaper LimeSDR, although the main chipset is different as the FreeSRP uses the AD9364 chip and the LimeSDR uses their own LimeMicro LMS7002M chip. The AD9364 is the same chip used in the USRP B200 units. Below is an in-class comparison given on the FreeSRP CrowdSupply page.

Below is the FreeSRP promotional video.