Overview

ANTSDR E200 is inspired by PlutoSDR and Ettus USRP B200. ANTSDR-E200 could support iio driver and uhd driver with different firmware.

The CPU of PlutoSDR is ZYNQ, which contains dual ARM cortex-A9 cores. This is an embedded SDR platform. The user's SDR application can run directly on the ARM without an additional host computer. Ettus USRP B200 is not an embedded SDR device, the USRP B200 must work with the host computer. ANTSDR-E200 also uses ZYNQ as the processor, which means that ANTSDR-E200 can work like PlutoSDR. In fact, we have ported the open-source firmware of PlutoSDR to support ANTSDR-E200, which makes ANTSDR-E200 work like PlutoSDR.

Although PlutoSDR has the advantage of being able to work independently of the host, but if user wants to obtain the IQ data from the baseband on the host computer, USB2.0 interface between host and PlutoSDR limits the transmission bandwidth, the maximum transmission bandwidth of USB2.0 is 480Mbit. Meanwhile, USRP B200 uses USB3.0 to transfer IQ data to the host. USB3.0 can support a maximum transmission bandwidth of 5Gbps. In addition to bandwidth limitations, the default firmware of PlutoSDR does not have a timestamp function, which means PlutoSDR can't work with timestamp SDR applications such as srsRAN. ANTSDR-E200 adopts 1Gb ethernet, the speed of Ethernet is between USB2.0 and USB3.0, and we have also ported UHD firmware to ANTSDR-E200, which makes ANTSDR-E200 work like USRP B200. In the UHD firmware, we use the UOE (UDP Data Offload Engine) to increase the bandwidth of the Ethernet.

Visually speaking, having an ANTSDR-E200 is equivalent to having both PlutoSDR and USRP B200 at the same time. With the Ethernet interface of ANTSDR-E200, you can easily use a network switch to deploy ANTSDR-E200 to the remote end.

Block Diagram

Result

UHD based apps

Using UHD to communicate with devices.

Using GQRX to receive FM radio.

srsRAN :

IIO based apps

Using ADI oscilloscope to sweep wide band LTE signal.

openwifi

open source

You can find the UHD based firmware and host driver here:

https://github.com/MicroPhase/antsdr_uhd

You can find the IIO based firmware here:

https://github.com/MicroPhase/antsdr-fw

You can find the reduced version of schematic here:

https://github.com/MicroPhase/antsdr-fw/blob/master/schematic/ANT-E200_Public.pdf

TODO:

We will try to crowdfund this product on the crowdsupply.