On 09/09/2011 07:26 PM, Tuan (Johnny) Ta wrote:
./benchmark_ofdm_rx.py -f 2.412G
The value of the frequency depends on the daughterboards you’re using.
If you’re using USRP1 make sure the decimation rate is 1/2 of the
interpolation rate as the ADC is 2 times faster than the DAC on the
USRP1 (or the other way around, you should chek that).
The DAC on the USRP1 runs at twice the rate of the ADC.
Watch out for the frequency offset, it killed the system for me. If
the above doesn’t work, run the transmitter on 1 USRP and usrp_fft.py
on the other. Check the center frequency of the FFT plot and manually
adjust the receiver center frequency. I used the RFX2400 boards and
the offset for me was ~ 40kHz.
Frequency offset comes up a lot on this list. It’s usually in the
context of someone who has up to this point in their DSP/SDR “career”
only been dealing with baseband signals inside a simulation
environment–and environment that doesn’t always adequately reflect
what you’ll experience in real-world systems, and real-world
channels.
RF synthesizers are only as good as their reference clock. The
reference clocks on most garden variety RF platforms are usually of
good-to-excellent quality. But they may still have residual errors
of a few 10s of PPM. So that means for every MHz of frequency,
the absolute, actual frequency could be “off” by a few 10s of Hz.
Multiply that up to typical channel frequencies for many experiments
in the modern communications domain of 1 to 3GHz or even higher, and
you can easily end up with 10s of Khz of absolute frequency offset,
and this applies to both the transmitter and receiver.
In typical cellular phone systems like LTE, and GSM and the like, the
base-station transmitters typically have really good reference clocks–
good to a few PPB–a local rubidium clock, or a GPSDO. The the
hand-helds typically have cheap local reference clocks, in order to meet
the grueling BOM cost requirements of typical consumer electronics.
What that means is that the demodulation chain needs some mechanism to
deal with frequency offset, and provide feedback to “center”
the baseband signal–either by tweaking the RX hardware, or shifting
the baseband signal in software. But the example code that’s floating
around is typically not a complete system in this regard. In
some sense, much of it was designed to work in the “fantasy” land of
the simulation environment, and may not work that well in the real
world. In some OFDM systems, for example, I understand that there
is often a “pilot” carrier against which one can correlate some kind
of sequence, and once you’ve found the most-strongly-correlated
“bin” in the OFDM “comb”, you can use that to estimate the frequency
offset relative to the transmitter. Examples and simulations may or
may not have that covered. College-level programs in DSP and SDR may
or may not discuss that important “real world” detail.
Physics, it turns out, is a harsh mistress…
–
Marcus L.
Principal Investigator
Shirleys Bay Radio Astronomy Consortium
