[time-nuts] WWVB BPSK Receiver Project?

Poul-Henning Kamp phk at phk.freebsd.dk
Thu Mar 15 22:13:21 UTC 2012


In message <20120315152620.8347488e049854218aed4aa6 at kinali.ch>, Attila Kinali w
rites:

>> Do you need 16 bits or can you get by with a 12 bit ADC?

In general: The more the merrier, for a digital dude like me, having 
more bits is easier than getting AGC working correctly :-)

>> Have you considered using an FPGA for signal processing? It seems
> you need a fairly serious CPU to handle that much data.

I have considered FPGA, DSP would probably be more suitable, but
if I can do it in an ARM with C/Assy code, I prefer that.

>I think Poul-Henning is refering to his AducLoran receiver, 

That's one of the few experiements I bothered to document, I've been
doing similar stuff with DCF77 phase-code etc.

As long as you're after time/freq, you can use very deep averaging
which only takes a few instructions per sample, so for instance
the 42MHz Aduc7026 chip copes nicely with a single Loran-C signal.

I think I could squeeze a Loran-C navigation solution into it, if
I wanted to and as long as we're not talking too high speeds (again
allowing deep averaging) but I have not bothered.

A modern PC has a lot of computing power for stuff like this, and
is great for prototyping code, before dumping into a smaller chip.

That's how I found out that the circular-buffer averaging comb-filter
is a much better and stronger signal discriminator than almost anything
else you can come up with, for frequency/phase reception.

See for instance: http://phk.freebsd.dk/loran-c/CW/

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.



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