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From: Benedikt Heinz <zn000h@gmail.com>
To: Harald Welte <laforge@gnumonks.org>
Cc: tetra@lists.osmocom.org
Sent: Wednesday, June 1, 2011 11:19 AM
Subject: Re: Fun Cube Dongle Pro internals

Hi!

2011/5/29 Harald Welte <laforge@gnumonks.org>:
> Hi!
>
> For those interested, I've taken apart the case and did some
> investigation how the FCDP hardware architecture looks like.
>
> The results are available at
> http://tetra.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/Funcube_Dongle

That's quite interesting as the E4000 seems to handle all the analog
stuff without external LNA, etc.
Simplifies things a lot.

> It seems the silicon tuner actually is intended for DVB-T, thus the
> bandwidth it can down-convert is _much_ higher.  However, the audio
> codec that they use can only do 96kHz.
>
> That's actually really sad.  I wish they had used something with higher
> ADC rate.  But it seems like even high-end audio codecs never get you
> beyond 196/216 kHz - still insufficient for e.g. GSM.

I wasn't able to find the output bandwidth of the E4000 somewhere on
the website. Do you have an idea of the bw?
Still, gluing a faster dual-ADC plus hi-speed USB IF to the tuner
shouldn't be that much of a problem.

It seems though, the E4000 can only be obtained from Elonics. No luck
with digikey, R+S, farnell...
Maybe we should try to ask Elonics if they'd be willing to provide
some samples+datasheet and the DVB-T reference design.
If we somehow could put an open design together, I guess we could find
someone to build+sell larger quantities.

I really would be interested in such a dongle w/ faster ADCs.
What do you think?

Regards,

Benedikt / hunz