The announcement, attached below, will probably have an impact on the Software-defined Radio marketplace... and the various SDR equipment (and associated software) that is available for our use.
Ettus makes a set of hardware circuit boards, and associated small enclosures, which have been popular in the academic community. We have about 10 of them at NJIT, and my colleagues and I have been using them for some experimental work.
They incorporate 66MHz 14 bit A/D converters... and include both transmit and receiver functionality. There is a mother board... and various small daughter boards that plug into it. You can plug in HF (0-60MHz) transmit and receive daughter boards, or much higher frequency daughter boards. Each mother board can have two different daughter boards plugged into it. I've been playing around with one of these using a 0-60 MHz receiver daughter board (just 1 daughter board)... that, in combination with the motherboard, is essentially equivalent to an SDR-I/Q. I am using it as a wideband spectrum display ... and I can monitor as much as a 16MHz segment of the 0-60MHz spectrum.. or as little as a 250kHz segment. I usually keep it set for a 250kHz total display centered on 1.880 or 3.880 or 50.2 MHz... etc. It works great... the display is just as good as the display using my Flex SDR-1000, except that is covers a wider range of frequencies.
The issue, up to now has been the software. Suffice it to say that it is a pain to work with the software that complements the ETTUS hardware. The software can be found by entering GNUradio in your browser. It runs on the Ubuntu operating system... which is a flavor of Linux. The programming language is a combination of C+ (for creating building blocks) and Python (to create applications... by linking the building blocks together). In my opinion, the available GNUradio documentation is inadequate... unless you are more interested in creating software than you are in creating, and using, SDR applications.
With the acquisition of ETTUS by National Instruments (the folks who market the popular application suite called LabView)... and the associated commitment to create a general purpose interface between LabView and the ETTUS hardware... I expect that it will become much easier to create custom SDR applications (e.g. the things we have been talking about in other threads).
Best regards
Stu
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Matt Ettus <
matt@ettus.com>
Date: Fri, Feb 5, 2010 at 12:54 PM
Subject: [USRP-announce] Ettus Research News
To:
usrp-announce@lists.ettus.comEttus Research LLC was founded in 2004 to produce high quality, low
cost software radio systems, and bring these capabilities to everyone.
In the last five and a half years this company, which started in a
garage, has shipped thousands of products to users in over 67
countries. Those products have been used for everything from mapping
the earth, moon and stars to tracking wildlife, from teaching signal
processing to obtaining a PhD., by everyone from individual hobbyists
to huge research teams, for communicating across a desk, under water,
under ground, across town, and around the world.
Today, as the next step in the growth of our company, we are very
proud to announce that Ettus Research has been acquired by National
Instruments Corporation (NI,
http://www.ni.com). NI was founded in
1976 to transform the way engineers and scientists around the world
design, prototype, and deploy systems for test, control, and embedded
design applications.
Below you will find answers to some questions you may have about this change.
What does this mean for Ettus Research LLC and its products?
For the most part, things will stay the same. We will continue
to operate separately from, but as a wholly-owned subsidiary of
National Instruments. Our web address, email, phone, and postal
addresses will all stay the same. All sales will continue to be
direct. The additional resources the acquisition provides us will
help us to serve you better and faster.
The USRP family of hardware for software radio will continue to
be our main product line, and it will continue to be actively
developed and improved. We have several exciting new products we are
working on for release later this year. We are also working on a new
"Universal Hardware Driver" or UHD, which will completely encapsulate
everything needed to control all of our hardware in a single driver.
This will enable software developers to use USRP hardware without
having to worry about the low level details of daughterboard control,
kernel drivers, or other factors. The UHD will be cross-platform,
allowing use on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X.
What does this mean for GNU Radio?
Ettus Research will continue to support and contribute to GNU
Radio, and the combination of GNU Radio software and USRP hardware
will remain our core focus. The additional resources that a large
company like NI can provide will allow us to focus even more energy on
improving the overall capabilities of the system. Two of the core GNU
Radio developers, Matt Ettus and Josh Blum, are employed by Ettus
Research.
In the future we will also likely be providing GNU Radio
drivers for additional hardware from National Instruments.
What does this mean for LabVIEW?
The Universal Hardware Driver will allow us to produce
high-quality, officially supported LabVIEW drivers for all of our
hardware. We hope to have those drivers available in the coming
months.
What does this mean for those using Simulink, OSSIE, OpenBTS, SCARI,
or other software with their USRP hardware?
Ettus Research is fully committed to enabling the use of USRP
hardware with any and every software platform for SDR. The UHD will
ease both the technical and the licensing hurdles which have made this
somewhat difficult in the past. We will be actively seeking input
from the key representatives of those communities in order to ensure
that the UHD API will fulfill their needs.
Will USRP hardware be sold through National Instruments?
In the short term, no, all sales will continue to be directly
through Ettus Research, but in the longer term we may offer some or
all products through NI's worldwide sales network as well.
In summary, we will continue to bring you high quality, low cost
devices for software radio systems, to enable you, our users, to
create exciting, groundbreaking radio communication systems.
If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask. Thank you
for your time and your support.
Matt Ettus
President, Ettus Research LLC
matt@ettus.com
