Talk:Universal Software Radio Peripheral

B200/B210

Ettus recently released the B200 and B210 SDRs, and as such the B100 is no longer their primary offering. The page should probably be updated to reflect this.

128.46.75.41 (talk) 12:57, 5 September 2013 (UTC)

Article Updates

Greetings. We are considering some minor changes to this page. We'd like to:

• split the technical descriptions into product category(i.e. bus, networked, embedded) and provide a little description on each
• provide a section that talks specifically about the USRP Hardware Driver(UHD)(tm) and
• provide a section that talks about the NI-USRP(tm)
• add some content to applications section

Will probably start making some changes next week if there are no objections.

Jmalsbury (talk) 01:04, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

WIRED ARTICLE

WIRED just ran a fascinating profile of Matt Ettus and his research into USRP. The WIRED writer positively flushed with the possibilities for this technology. What are the "coolest," most radical ideas that this technology can enable?

Dubious

"The USRP has an open design"

I doubt this fact, as long as open design is defined strictly. Though Ettus provides schematics for the USRP [1], PCB layout information is missing ("The motherboard layout was done in PADS, layout files are not distributed.", [2]). As layouting is an essential and nontrivial step, you cannot directly (i.e. with minimal effort) construct functional hardware from the provided schematics.
I'd like to compare this with software. Imagine that a minimally functioning GNU/Linux consisted of half its code base being closed source, the other half being open source. Further imagine you could not get a runnable instance of GNU/Linux by solely building the open source part. Would one still consider GNU/Linux being open source as a whole? -Abdull (talk) 15:50, 6 February 2010 (UTC)

Agreed. HectorH (talk) 10:13, 8 February 2010 (UTC)

I strongly disagree. The schematics are the design. They are equivalent to source code. The PCB layout is equivalent to a compiled binary. There are innumerable ways you can layout the same circuit. This is equivalent to using different compilers and compiler settings to generate different binaries for different target platforms. It does not matter if PCB layout is nontrivial. Compiling software is nontrivial. Linux is nontrivial to build and install from source. How many people build their systems from source? The point is, that you are free to take the USRP schematics and produce a PCB layout which you may then distribute in the same manner that Red Hat and Debian distribute compiled Linux binaries.

The imaginary half-close/half-open Linux is a bad argument because it is not far from reality. How many people really run Linux without at least one closed-source driver or non-GPL firmware? I have yet to see GNU/LINUX system that works without a closed-source BIOS. In fact, GNU/Linux is not a whole entity. They are separate projects, yet each by itself is still considered to be open source. Would GNU software not be considered open source without Linux? This was the case for many years. GNU was started 7 years before there was a free open source operating system kernel to host any of the GNU licensed software.

USRP may not help promote their open design by not including a PCB layout reference, but this is unrelated to whether the design itself should be considered open or not.

Noah (talk) 23:36, 2 April 2010 (UTC)

Show me a tool that does a ./configure; make; make install; for schematics -> PCB layout and I'll agree with you.

I partly agree with you because Ettus provides their schematics only in PDF format. While the schematics are not very complex and someone could redraw them in a day, I don't think that is a good excuse. They should publish a the SCH files or a netlist at least. Noah (talk) 22:35, 20 May 2010 (UTC)

Price

Article says: "The USRP is intended to be a comparatively inexpensive hardware device" That's a useful information, but too vague. Please cite at least an approximate price. In fact, the price of the device seems to be a significant feature of it, so should be included.

I couldn't find any price on the vendor's website. It doesn't matter whether it costs $60 ot $89, but it does make a big difference whether the device costs $50 or $500. I currently have no idea which price class this is in or whether it's affordable for me or not. That determines whether I'll be interested in it and the software which uses it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Benbucksch (talk • contribs) 03:25, 25 March 2010 (UTC)

For pricing see http://www.ettus.com/order T.pienn (talk) 15:11, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

Units

"sample" is not an SI unit and capital letter S stands for Siemens. This makes it very confusing as well as breaching Wikipedia units guidelines as far as I know. In the SI word this should be saying "sampling rate is 60 MHz", not "it samples at 60 megasamples per second" or derivative. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.122.243.111 (talk) 02:33, 23 February 2010 (UTC)

Missing Source

Source 5 (gps-sdr.com) now leads to a godaddy default domain parking page. A WHOIS reveals that the domain is still registered to a Gregory Heckler of GPS SDR LLC, so maybe there is still hope for that source. See: http://who.godaddy.com/WhoIs.aspx?domain=gps-sdr.com&prog_id=godaddy And: http://www.gps-sdr.com/source/html/main.html --Spengy (talk) 22:49, 25 February 2010 (UTC)

Need redirect

For some reason, Universal_software_radio_peripheral doesn't redirect here. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.23.95.33 (talk) 09:02, 3 June 2014 (UTC)

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Remove the "Applications" section?

Hi; although I'm affiliated with Ettus/NI, I feel that this section is largely meaningless, at best an advertisement.

These devices are SDRs. If your application allows for SDR implementation, you can use an SDR, for example a USRP. Knowing the USRP user community quite well, I could probably expand that list to above 100 entries (not kidding). Which would be nice, but useless as encyclopedic entry.

I'd hence would propose to delete that section altogether, since it serves no encyclopedic purpose.

IS that appropriate? Is there a template I should apply to the section prior?

--Marcusmueller ettus (talk) 17:24, 28 October 2020 (UTC)

I agree, this doesn't add much to the article. Readers can check out the software-defined radio article if they want to learn of typical applications of SDRs. I will delete the section, and if anyone wants to protest, go right ahead and discuss the section's utility here. --{{u|Mark viking}} {Talk} 02:29, 29 October 2020 (UTC)