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Old February 6th 16, 06:07 PM posted to rec.radio.amateur.equipment,uk.radio.amateur
gareth gareth is offline
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First recorded activity by RadioBanter: Sep 2012
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Default An SDR or DDS question?

"Brian Howie" wrote in message
...
In message , gareth
writes
Presumably those SDR rigs which do not work on the IF but
directly from antennae must have, separately from the DSP processor,
some semblance of a DDS generator (but without the final DAC) to
act as the equivalent of the VFO, for I cannot perceive that a
fractional-Hz
tuning rate could be achieved with machine code running in the DSP
processor?

I'm not an expert ,but I think what you're asking is " how is the local
oscillator generated" in a direct conversion SDR and "what determines its
resolution"
There is an example here, :-
http://www.radioelementi.it/public/saqrx.pdf
The "c" source code is here,which I can just about understand ( My
software background is FORTRAN and Matlab) :-
https://sites.google.com/site/sm6lkm/saqrx/
Softies shouldn't have a problem with it although I was able to mess about
with it and recompile it successfully
In this case the spectrum is dc to 22050Hz in 512 steps. It's not the LO
precision ( it's floating point in this one) that limits it but the size
of the FFT , the sample rate and thus the record length, that sets the
minimum FFT bin width . This one tunes in lumps of about 43Hz


Thank-you Brian, but what you have URLed is already at baseband, being VLF.


When moving from FORTRAN to C, the major difference (apart from the
nitty-gritty
of statement syntax) is that in FORTRAN, variables are always passed by
reference
(at least in FORTRAN '66 which I did 47 years ago) and in C you have the
choice of passing
by value or by reference.