Up market SDR dev kits - AD9361

AD9361 SDR on AD-FMCOMMS2-EBZ

I'm lucky enough to have access to a range of different toys (err tools) and the latest gadget that someone has kindly lent me is an Analog Devices AD-FMCOMMS2-EBZ and a matching Digilent ZedBoard. This evaluation board features the AD9361 two channel 70-6000MHz SDR transceiver chip. The AD9361 has dual 12 bit ADC and DAC giving 72dB dynamic range (compared to the the HackRF's 48dB). Maximum bandwidth is 56MHz. The Ettus E310 is also based in this chip and that's a $4200 AUD radio. (about $2600 more than this solution)

Once of the best things about this evaluation kit is that Analog Devices fully support it and a number of different motherboards with a prebuilt Ubuntu ARM image which contains example applications and a fully functional GNU-RADIO source and sink block. This means you hit the ground running and you are not restricted to vendor specific applications. What will I do with it? Good question and hopefully I will be in a better position to answer it intelligently after I complete a week of FPGA/VHDL training next week :-) (Stay tuned for updates to this post)

Digilent ZedBoard ARM/FPGA combo.