RADIOBERRY - HF SDR TRANSCEIVER PI HAT

[Music] hi and welcome back to another tech minds video now this video i want to show you this now this is called a radio berry it uses the same cable modem chip as the hermes light 2 the ad9806 and for the fpga it uses an intel cyclone 10 fpga so what exactly is a radio berry well in short it's a radio card designed as a raspberry pi hat now all of the gerber files and component information can be found on the github page if you want to build this yourself but this one i purchased directly from aliexpress as there are a few sellers selling a ready-to-go board i'll link below now you will notice there are two sma sockets one for receive and the other is for transmit now the radio barrier fits nicely on top of the raspberry pi 4 and is powered and controlled by the header that goes between the pi 4 and the radio berry now before i install the software i will connect the radio barrier to the pi 4 like this and i'll also attach a receiving antenna and the tx output socket i will connect to a dummy load i'm also going to connect an ethernet connection to the pi and of course its power supply now my pi 4 already has the raspberry pi operating system installed and i also have it configured so that i can access its desktop remotely using vnc viewer so let's go ahead and install the software and see how well it works so once you have access to the pi's desktop or to a terminal window via ssh using an application like putty you're now ready to start the software installation now with the terminal window open enter the following commands as shown on the screen and make sure you press enter after each line now as these installation instructions could change in the future i will link to the software installation page on the radio barrie github so you can find the latest set of commands to install the software now this installation only used four commands and that's because the developer of the radio barrie johann pa3gsb has created a nice and easy to use installation script now installation only takes a few minutes and once it's finished the radio berry is actually ready to use now there is a remark concerning the latest linux distro at the time of making this video that mentions the possible issue with the stable version of the radio berry software now if you experience issues and you're using the latest linux distro on your rpi4 then please use the development release this is done by using the installation commands under the development section now once the installation script is finished you should see confirmation that the radio bury firmware has been installed and that the radio bury service has been installed and started on your pi 4 now at this point i would recommend that you reboot your pi 4. now there are a few software packages that will control the radio barrie including a self-contained sdr application that will run directly on the pi 4 itself but i'll cover those in another video as they're actually quite lengthy in this video i will show you how to use sdr console running on a pc which is connected to the same network as your radio barium pi 4. now when you first start sdr console you're given the opportunity to create a radio definition click the definition button and then from the new pop-up window click on the search button on the top left notice the radio berry is based on the hermes light 2 look for hermes light and select it sdr console will now scan your network and pick up the radio barry click the add button to add the radio bury definition and then click save now you can select radio barry from the list although it will show as herm is light if you have not renamed it once selected set the bandwidth to 384 kilohertz and click start nine kilo two golf tango 59 thanks and once you're at this stage everything should be working well and you should be able to switch bands and receive the entire hf band now sdr console also supports transmit so if you wanted to transmit from the tx port you can use the tx feature of sdr console now i made some brief tests with the radio barrier connected to my nice side power and swr meter and it appears the radio barrie puts out around 100 to 150 milliwatts of rf power across the hf band now this isn't a lot of power but it would be enough to drive a preamp board now currently i have a preamp board designed for the radio berry on its way to me now once it arrives and have it configured i'll demonstrate how you can transmit with the radio berry with 5 watts now as you can see here from the waterfall on sdr console there's no lag the performance is pretty outstanding and it's working really well now there are two major factors here that helps with performance the first is that we're using the powerful raspberry pi 4 and secondly we're connected to the pi via ethernet now just like the home is lite 2 i would only recommend using an ethernet connection i wouldn't recommend using wi-fi from a laptop for example now with regards to whether the raspberry pi 3 would be powerful enough to run the radio berry software i don't know i would highly doubt the performance of a pi 3 would be able to provide such a smooth stream of data as the pi 4 does also there's no mention of using a pi 3 on the radio barrie github page maybe i'll test the pi 3 in the future but if you've already done these tests then please let me know down in the comment section below if you're interested in this project then make sure to stay subscribed to this channel as i have more videos coming which will cover using pi hp sdr directly on the pi with a pi touch screen and another video demonstrating a 5 watt preamp board there we go guys i hope you enjoyed this video if you have a radio berry board and you've used it let me know down in the comment section below on how well you think it performs remember this is not an off-the-shelf solution to provide a sdr hf transceiver but it's actually an experimental board that you can have fun learning with obviously with the right components you could actually use it as a main hf radio which is what i actually plan to do once i have all the right parts until the next video stay safe take care thanks for watching and i'll see you in the next one [Music] foreign

Channel: Tech Minds

Views: 96,579

Keywords: ham, radio, software, defined, digital, dstar, dmr, fusion, ysf, nxdn, antenna, resonant, nanoVNA, how to make, how to, tutorial, waterfall, signal, transmission, qo-100, eshail2, tech minds, radioberry, fpga, cyclone 10, hermes literadio berry, hf trasceiver

Id: 1zNWX85wa8Y

Length: 7min 31sec (451 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 27 2021