Picking up where we left off yesterday with test and measurement examples, we have one this time from Lime’s millimeter wave IC design team, demonstrating LimeSDR being used as a vector network analyzer (VNA). RF test equipment that, unfortunately, typically has a truly eye-watering price tag attached, VNAs are used to characterize components in terms of gain, return loss and voltage standing wave radio (VSWR) etc. As such they are invaluable when it comes to developing and validating the performance of system components, including filters, amplifiers and antennas.

Getting back to wireless applications, John Melton has been busy working on adding support for LimeSDR to his PiHPSDR project. This will use a Raspberry Pi 3 together with the official 7 inch touch screen, to create a compact and eminently affordable, fully SDR amateur radio transceiver.

John, who is a long time core contributor to openHPSDR, has ported WDSP from Windows to Linux and this provides the DSP core. He already has the application working with his LimeSDR board and an Intel i5 system, and next he will be getting everything up and running on an actual Pi. To find out more about the project please see John’s blog post.

Andrew and the LimeSDR Team