On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 7:40 AM, George Nychis <address@hidden>
wrote:
Thanks Brian, this is definitely helpful.
No problem.
I think I'm going to have to pass on implementing this functionality.
Well hold on now - there may still be things you can do!
1. according to Matt it takes ~200us to lock to a new frequency. I
still
can't find exact Bluetooth specs in terms of guard times (which
would be the
max time to hop), but I suspect its tens of microseconds. Do you
know the
GSM frequency hopping times?
I believe they are in the 2ms range.
2. there's no way I'm making a USRP hardware modification.
However, could
something be devised where the FPGA relay's something encapsulated
back to
the FX2 to get around this? Something such as encapsulating an I2C
write in
a in-band command packet, wait for the timestamp to reach, and then
strip
the in-band packet out and pass it from the FPGA to the FX2? I
don't know
how possible that is.
Sounds a bit tricky and a little too complicated. I've got an idea to
think about (further down).
3. I _think_ that the dboard tuning and control for USRP2 happens
in the
FPGA, according to something Jonathan mentioned to me off list.
Given that
I already have a 95% full FPGA with all of the MAC-enhancements....
I don't
even know if I'd be able to fit some sort of relaying functionality
in if
its even possible.... which will be much easier to do in USRP2 if
tuning is
done in the FPGA. So if that's the case, this functionality will
wait for
USRP2.
What about bandpass sampling? Nyquist just requires that we sample 2x
the bandwidth. We have that criterion met with the 64Msps ADC, and
the CIC/halfband filtering that happens takes out the high frequency
images that will occur during the mixing stage (done by the CORDIC in
the FPGA).
If we know a) the frequency range it needs to cover and b) the
frequencies it's going to hop to, you can pick a centralized frequency
that has the most image rejection, and just twiddle the phase
increment value connected to the CORDIC and let the CIC/halfband do
the rest. Only one tuned frequency, and something that is
controllable within the FPGA can give you some significant frequency
hopping capabilities.
So what do you think? Do we know (a) and (b) listed above for
Bluetooth? For GSM?
Brian
PS - I realize this works for RX only, but there might be the option
for a separate daughterboard for the TX portion of a frequency hopping
scheme to be figured out as well without hardware mods.