We’re delighted to welcome the Radio Astronomy Software Defined Radio (RASDR) project, which is developing a low cost, high performance SDR receiver for radio astronomers and educational institutions, that is based around the Reference Platform RF module plus a USB 3.0 interface board.

Key features:

  • Two channel simultaneous receive at max. 28 MHz bandwidth
  • Transceiver programmable between 400 MHz to 3.8GHz with 12 bit I/Q sampling and 9 built-in RF paths
  • Maximum Data Transfer of 160MB/s
  • External reference clock input, enabling synchronous operation with test equipment and facility timing signals
  • External general purpose I/O (GPIO) port providing 8 3.3V GPIOs and +5V power (1.25W maximum)
  • Pulse Per Second (PPS) input on GPIO synchronously sampled and available in the receive data stream

RASDR is being developed by the Society of Amateur Radio Astronomers (SARA) and is presently at the incubation phase while the project and associated development processes are fully established.

We’re thrilled to be working with SARA and excited by the prospect of what the future may hold. This is the first of what we hope will be many more collaborations, spanning wireless communications and beyond, to bring the power and flexibility of software radio systems to a diverse community with important and worthwhile RF applications.

— Andrew

For further details see the project page, RASDR website and GitHub repository.