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Comment by dancek | Hacker News Reader

> affordable for students and RF enthusiasts

Takes a lot of scrolling to see the price, which is $480. That's probably affordable considering the specs. But the cheap way to experiment with an SDR is to repurpose a $20 USB TV tuner.

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As long as you don't plan to transmit. A 20 bucks tuner is cute, but won't get you too far, especially with noise and heat problems affecting signal quality. But yeah, a generally nice way of getting to know sdr and whether you're interested in it at all before spending serious money on grown up boards.

Even the HackRF clones are a quarter of the cost and are much more capable than a 20-40 dollar SDR

For the frequency ranges in which they overlap the rtlsdr dongles out perform the HackRF. I bought my first rtlsdr in early 2013 and am a HackRF kickstarter backer. The BladeRFs are great if you want to do serious work like running cell basestations. That extra price you pay is worth it in that regard.

The cheapest way is to start with a RTL SDR tuner and for example Gnuradio.

If you want to experiment with celluar mobile radios LTE you need a LimeSDR, BladeRF and a help processor.

What is a help processor?

Help CPU I meant, something accelerating the signal processing from the software defined radio often a FPGA, field programmable gate array.

In context of GnuRadio and similar, do any projects already utilize FPGA acceleration as offered by USRP?

From what I've seen, it all happens on the CPU.

"If you want to experiment with celluar mobile radios LTE you need a LimeSDR, BladeRF and a help processor."

Why would you need a LimeSDR and a BladeRF ?

I have done plenty of (rx only) GSM/LTE functions with only the (v1) BladeRF ...

If you really want LTE, it's more about xtrx than LimeSDR and BladeRF.

Adalm Pluto comes to mind.

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