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kieranl | 3 months ago

I got to see this in person at pacificon a few weeks ago. Also the creator is my friend from UIUC who I consider a brilliant rf/DSP engineer.

The demo was able to show and end to end tx chain from gnuradio to a receiver. Really excited to see this! As there are a myriad of other things that this hardware can be used for as well.

discuss

order

mrtnmcc|3 months ago

Great seeing you at Pacificon!

We’re starting with the “Quad” tile — a 4 Tx × 4 Rx SDR designed for arraying — and expect to ship the first units toward the end of this year. They're actually quite capable as a standalone SDR. A Quad can interface directly with a Raspberry Pi 5, and we’ve built a combined enclosure for the SDR + Pi setup. You can run SDR software locally on the Pi or stream IQ samples over gigabit Ethernet to a remote PC.

Software support includes GNU Radio, Pothos SDR, and just about any tool compatible with SoapySDR. We’re also doing some fun demos, like visualizing Wi-Fi signal sources in real time ("Wi-Fi camera") and performing mm-scale 3D localization—a prerequisite for the automatic array calibration.

Larger arrays are assembled by simply tiling these Quads into an aluminum/PCB lattice framework, enabling anything from compact 4-antenna MIMO nodes up to 240-element lunar-bounce arrays. The goal is to have full phased-array capability by March 2026.

The broader vision behind open.space is to make advanced RF and space-communications hardware open and accessible—so anyone can experiment with technologies once limited to national labs: moon-bounce (EME) links, satellite reception, terrestrial RF imaging.

Happy to answer questions here.

One thing I'm excited about getting working is mobile moon bounce!

drmpeg|3 months ago

Will you have arrays with the opposite antenna polarity for point to point links? That is, LHCP (Tx), RHCP (Rx) instead of RHCP (Tx), LHCP (Rx).

baobrien|3 months ago

What does the RF front end look like? I see the Lattice ECP5, but what are you using to go from bits to waves?