The Red Pitaya hardware is the first low cost RX / TX capable SDR hw to come onto the market that is open source and can match the Ettus Research USRP periperhal. It has a combined CPU and FPGA signal chain with two channels 14 bit 125 MSPS A/D and D/A. It also has a Dual core ARM Cortex A9+ FPGA (Xilinx Zynq 7010 system on chip). Only a few years ago this caliber of hardware had to be custom designed and was typically used in radar antijamming systems, radar signature classification systems, ultrasound, sonar and in high end vibration analysis tools (as examples). The ARM CPU on board can run Linux and it has GNU-Radio support. For fast data transfer there is a GBE (Gibabit Ethernet) interface to other host systems. With a a RTOS on the ARM core or a zero copy IP stack under Linux it should be possible to approach fairly close to 1 Gbit/sek transfer rates to host systems (if needed).
References:
http://www.rs-online.com/designspark/electronics/eng/nodes/view/type:design-centre/slug:red-pitaya
http://wiki.redpitaya.com/index.php?title=Hardware_Overview
Red Pitaya SDR TX / RX
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