FPGAs and other misc

[Frank Gentges]

Bob,

You spoke of some of the really cool work you did earlier on DSP 
demodulation one day at tacos.  You should get back in there with that work.

Things do seem to be opening up for use of FPGAs on lesser "taco grade" 
projects.  The Xilnx people have a free development package at

http://www.xilinx.com/ise/logic_design_prod/webpack.htm

but they require you to register. I have not done that and have not seen 
what it really looks like.  One option is to download and the other is 
to request multiple DVDs.

Perhaps one of us should request the DVDs and see just how useful this 
stuff really is.  It suggests we might have to pay for shipping and I 
would be glad to chip in.  We should avoid having a bunch of us piling 
in with requests right now.

A couple of Xilinx development systems were sold on eBay the other day 
for around $75 and $130 but I am not sure if they would be useful for 
what we are looking at.

I also found the National Semiconductor "Analog By Design" web page that 
has a group of seminars on it.  Two are about high speed data transfer 
and seem very relevant to SDR designs.  Bob Pease, a famous analog 
design guru, hosts these seminars.  I have enjoyed them and learned some 
finer points of design.

See http://www.national.com/nationaltv/

These seminars also suggest how we might digitize some of our monthly 
meeting presentations and put them on the web for our remotely located 
members.  I am not sure many of our presenters would agree if we made 
the files open to the general public so we may want to restrict access 
to members only.  Thoughts?

Frank K0BRA

Bob Bruhns wrote:
> Hi Terry,
> 
> www.fpga4fun.com is a cool site.
> 
> It's time for me to get back into this.  I have an application that requires either a 200K sample rate, or undersampling for a
> 40K bandwidth.  Then I want to apply DSP.
> 
> Nobody makes anything to do that at any reasonable price, so it's time to make my own.  I remember that there was a generally
> available 500K/S ADC a few years back.  I see ultra high speed ADC as the next step in SDR, and FPGA makes the logic hardware
> much easier to do.
> 
> I had something cool going for synchronous AM, DSB and BPSK signal reception a few years back, but it was using a
> block-converting FFT.  It was still pretty good.  Hal has suggested a streaming-serial oriented FFT.
> 
> And of course there is the never-ending parade of wierd logic analysis needs...
> 
> Also I have to remember to send in my dues again.
> 
>    Bob, WA3WDR
> _______________________________________________
> Tacos mailing list
> Tacos at amrad.org
> http://www.amrad.org/mailman/listinfo/tacos
>