Hacker News Reader

Comment by efitz | Hacker News Reader

Um, yeah, I don’t have $20k to drop on an Ettus USRP X310 and two daughterboards. I would have liked to have played with it but that is too rich for me.

View on HN

A B210 with GPSDO is expensive, but considerably cheaper than $20k. Granted the functionality would be limited but it is possible for hobbyists to play with this.

An RFSoC 2x2 kit [1] could handle the RF part (with an FPGA included!), it's 2k, still expensive.

1: https://www.xilinx.com/support/university/xup-boards/RFSoC2x...

This is usually the very inspiration for a hacker to pull out the soldering iron to make one themselves because the off-the-shelf item is too damn expensive

I don't know for this particular case but usually expensive stuff has expensive components too, especially in low quantity

I have a B210 but the project indicated that it was only compatible with the X310 with two daughterboards.

From Hardware Requirements > SDR: "To sniff only downlink traffic from the base station, one can operate LTESniffer with USRP B210 which is connected to PC via a USB 3.0 port. Similarly, USRB B210 should be equipped with GPSDO and two RX antennas to decode downlink messages in transmission modes 3 and 4."

That’s one of the lessons learned when hacking your own thing. After enough projects and buying the parts & pieces (you never buy just one component), you end up with a stash that eventually means you don’t have to buy anything for a future project. It’s part of the cost of being a hacker.

From rather ancient memory, the high-end Ettus stuff is much, much more expensive than its BOM cost. You're paying for a well-designed and well-tested product with excellent RF performance and a good ecosystem. You buy it and it works.

You could design your own board(s) with the same parts, and you could build it for much less money. But you'd need to know what you're doing, and the design stage would be expensive.

You might not like what you find anyway...

Is it just me, or should you be able to do this with a pair of HackRFs with a clock jumper between the two? Or possibly a clock-sync pin tied between the CPLDs?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com