Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] usrp b210 and mimo

[Juha Vierinen]

I appreciate this a lot. I'll owe you guys beers the next time I see you. I'll be in SF next week at AGU if you guys want to meet up. 

I'm itching to start using the b210 with our incoherent scatter radar. It has more bandwidth and the tuner copes with the high dynamic range RFI environment better than our existing receiver. 

Our application requires continuous streaming, so I do hope that you figure out how to get this working too. 

juha

On Wed, Dec 10, 2014 at 7:47 AM, Balint Seeber <address@hidden> wrote:

Hi Juha,

Ian and I have been busy looking into this.

For the moment, I suggest running a 'finite_acquisiton' after creating the B210 device instance and setting time/clock sources, but before setting the times on each device. E.g. just the short bit of Python code:

u.finite_acquisition(16384)

Part of the problem is that the RX streamer is created on-the-fly (if it doesn't already exist) when you start streaming in GR, and this does some more device configuration. If you do a finite_acquisition, this will force the creation of the streamer before you run the flowgraph later (as normal). After the acquisition, you can set the times and everything should be aligned as you'd expect (we saw this working today).

We'll now look at making things 'just work'.

Hope that helps.

Kind regards,
Balint

On Fri, Dec 5, 2014 at 5:50 AM, Juha Vierinen <address@hidden> wrote:

I've slowly gathered the courage to try out the B210 devices. I was impressed by the fact that I could get 50 MHz of bandwidth out of it. However, I immediately ran into problems with absolute timing. 

I've been using the B210 for mimo with USRP N200 devices for testing. The N200 devices all nicely synchronize themselves to the external PPS and after multiple restarts, their timing will be accurate. However, the starting time of the B210 seems to have a random component with a standard deviation of about 100 microseconds. Every time I restart sampling, the offset between the N200 and the B210 is slightly different. There is no change in the timing offset between the N200 devices. 

Is this a known issue, or am I doing something wrong?  

This is how I configure the devices:

u.set_clock_source("external")

u.set_time_source("external")

tt = time.time()

while tt-math.floor(tt) < 0.2 or tt-math.floor(tt) > 0.3:

    tt = time.time()

    time.sleep(0.01)

print("Latching at "+str(tt))

u.set_time_unknown_pps(uhd.time_spec(math.ceil(tt)+1.0))

time.sleep(1)

u.set_start_time(uhd.time_spec( starttime ) )

juha

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