Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] HDTV and the USRP

[Eric Blossom]

On Wed, Jul 28, 2004 at 03:49:46PM -0700, Steve Schear wrote:
> At 12:23 PM 7/28/2004, John Gilmore wrote:
> >> Wasn't one of the major requirements of the USRP to be able to handle
> >> [HDTV in real time]?
> >
> >No.  The main requirement of the USRP was to make hardware that ordinary
> >people can buy and plug in, which is at least as capable as the $1200
> >PCI boards that were used in our early work (including the HDTV decoding).
> 
> My notes pre-date the USRP's formal design, but in them it was discussed 
> more than once that an ability of the sought after A/D - D/A board to 
> unburden the host CPU by performing demodulation was important.  Since I 
> was not involved in later design discussions I can only assume it was 
> dropped as a requirement.

FWIW, we do unburden the CPU, but we do it my moving the
computationally expensive and modulation independent digital up and
down conversion into the FPGA.  The FPGA can be used for other things
of course.

Eric