SDRA'22 - 11 - Henning Paul: Building a Tx capable SDR from used Bitcoin mining controllers
Henning has been building electronics since his childhood days and after receiving a Diploma and a PhD in information technology from the University of Bremen, he is now working as hardware development engineer in the industry. He has received his novice and full amateur radio licenses after attending online-only courses in 2021 and 2022, respectively, and after designing and building SDR receivers for several years, he has now extended his activities to self-built SDR transmitters.
This talk is a follow-up to my 2021 talk on building a homebrew Rx SDR based on Xilinx Zynq technology. In this talk, I will present how a decommissioned Bitcoin mining controller purchased on AliExpress for $15 can be repurposed into a Tx capable SDR. It is is presented how a high-speed DAC add-on board was designed and how it is interfaced to a QRP amplifier derived from the Hermes-Lite project. Furthermore, the signal processing in GNU Radio is explained and how this software-based transmitter can be interfaced to existing tools like WSJT-X using a self-written Python daemon that implements a CAT interface.
Camera & Edit: FurStreaming
Sebastian Kipp, DL5WN
Marc Diensberg, DO1BOL
Torben Hellige