Tagged: HPSDR

TechMinds: A Look at the TRX DUO Red Pitaya Clone

The Red Pitaya is advertised as an open source electronics laboratory instrument, but as it's essentially a software defined radio with built in computing hardware, custom software can be installed allowing it to function as an HPSDR compatible RX/TX capable SDR.

The TRX DUO is a "Red Pitaya compatible" device that comes at a price significantly lower that the Red Pitaya. Its specifications are comparable to the Red Pitaya SDRlab 122-16 which in the official website goes for 625,00€ / US$622. In comparison the TRX DUO can be found on marketplace sites like Aliexpress for almost half price at US$320.

The TRX-DUO has a tuning range from 10 kHz to 60 MHz, 16-bit ADC and 2-RX and 2-TX channels. It also has a built in ARM Cortex A9 processor, and Xilinx Zynq 7010 FPGA SOC. The built in computing means that decoding software can be run directly on the device if desired.

Matt from the TechMinds YouTube channel has recently tested and reviewed the TRX-DUO in his latest video. His video goes over the specifications, software installation, and a demonstration of it receiving HF signals. He goes on to show how it can be used as an 8-band WSPR monitor, and how you can enable WiFi on it and download various Red Pitaya apps.

Matt also notes that the transmit power of the TRX-DUO is very small at 2.5 mW, but of course an external amplifier can be used to boost this.  However, it is important to note that band filtering would be required for the emissions to be safe to transmit.

TRX DUO APPLICATION BASED HF SDR TRANSCEIVER (RED PIYATA)

Hermes and Red Pitaya now Supported in OpenWebRX

Thank you to Stefan Dambeck (DC7DS) for submitting news about OpenWebRX adding support for Hermes HPSDR compatible SDRs. Hermes is a single board version of the open source high performance SDR (HPSDR) design. There are several compatible Hermes designs including the newer Hermes-Lite 2 . The Red Pitaya is an open source electronics laboratory instrument, but custom software can be installed allowing it to function as an HPSDR type SDR. OpenWebRX is software which allows you to access your SDR remotely via the internet or local network through a web browser. Stefan notes:

I built a test setup today using a Red Pitaya 125-14 SDR in HPSDR mode, and this is now also supported, see screenshot.

At the moment, only one receive stream is supported, for the red pitaya with 192KHz bandwidth.

The Red Pitaya running in OpenWebRX

RTL_HPSDR: RTL-SDR to HPSDR Translation Server

The High Performance Software Defined Radio (HPSDR) project is an open source SDR project that aims to create a modular SDR for ham radio use. The idea is that users only need to include the specific HPSDR hardware that they need for their particular application.

Recently, Richard Koch has written a Linux based tool called RTL_HPSDR which allows RTL-SDR based dongles to be used with HPSDR software, such as cuSDR64 which is capable of displaying and controlling up to seven receiver slices simultaneously and PowerSDR which can display and control up to four.

Using his tool Richard was able to get seven R820T RTL-SDR dongles running simultaneously on an EKB311 Quad core ARM Cortex A9 based mini-pc using a USB 2.0 hub with a modified power supply to provide 5V@2A.

Seven RTL-SDR Setup.
Seven RTL-SDR USB Setup
Five RTL-SDR Dongles used with RTL_HPSDR and csSDR64.
Five RTL-SDR Dongles used with RTL_HPSDR and csSDR64
Two RTL-SDR dongles running on PowerSDR.
Two RTL-SDR dongles running on PowerSDR