Rx-Architecture Archives | Page 2 of 2

March 14, 2022 Localization

On Microchip AT86RF215 Radios

It is a little unusual to describe a hardware radio on a website that focuses on software radios. But I was impressed with the functionality and performance of AT86RF215 transceivers by Microchip during my experiments. I have used them for node localization and they can be put to many other good uses, including, …. here is the surprise, …. as software defined radios. Through a little programming effort, I/Q samples from the digital frontend can be directly accessed using which you can run your own baseband on a digital signal processor. Although interfacing with an external device for I/Q samples

October 24, 2022 DSP

On Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC), 6 dB SNR Gain per Bit, Oversampling and Undersampling

We have discussed before the sampling on time axis for analog to digital (A/D) conversion. An Analog to Digital Converter (ADC) produces the samples $x[n]$ of a continuous-time signal $x(t)$ at its input. Ideally, these samples are the exact values of the signal $x(t)$ at time instants $nT_s$ where $T_s=1/f_s$ is the sampling period. In practice, however, there are imperfections both on the y-axis and the x-axis. On y-axis, an ADC has a finite resolution depending on the number of bits used for quantization. On x-axis, there are issues of clock jitter that distort the samples produced. In this article,

A Tuned radio Frequency Receiver (TRF) selects the desired channel through a bandpass filter

February 21, 2022 Wireless/SDR

Tuned Radio Frequency (TRF) Receiver

The tasks of a communications receiver to demodulate the transmitted signal begin with selecting the signal within a specific bandwidth at a desired frequency, commonly known as a particular channel. In another article, we discuss specifications for a radio receiver such as dynamic range, noise floor and sensitivity. Today we discuss an architecture used in earlier generations of radios. To avoid interference from the neighboring channels, the most straightforward approach is to filter out the spectral contents outside this channel and amplify the desired signal in one or more RF amplification stages. This was one of the earliest techniques employed