Airspy 80mbps

[kb5udf]

Hi all,

I am the very happy owner of an airspy. While looking at their website today I noticed the
following statement under specifications and was intrigued:

"Up to 80 MSPS when using custom firmware"

My feeble attempts at googling did not turn up anything relevant. Does this firmware exist?
Are you using it? What are you doing with it? How is it working for you?

Thanks,

JB

 

[nherment]

While this reply is pretty late, I was looking for the same answer so I will post the response here for others.

There is no such firmware.
The reason is as follow (I quote):

>The problem is that the USB bus will limit the data transfer to about 20MSPS. And there is not enough RAM
> in the LPC4370 to buffer more than about 2x16KiB (double buffering) or 32KiB of data, and there is not
> enough processing power within the CPU to reduce this data. So unless 32KiB of data sampled at 80MSPS
> is enough for your function this is probably a dead end for your idea. If you are still going to use the two
> ADC ports the good news is that there is ESD protection in the R2 board, the R0 board had no ESD
> protection on the ADC inputs.

The source:
Circular Computing: Part Two: Airspy R2 - Questions and Answers

 

[br0adband]

Almost sounds like a bait and switch in some respects: a claim that the hardware might in some incredibly limited situation be able to technically do but in real-world usage of most any kind it will never be actually possible. I remember noting that when the Airspy R2 first got announced (the specs for the improved hardware) and was thinking "how the hell could anyone ever actually use 80 Mbps of potential bandwidth, that's just a crazy insane amount of data..." and then I came to realize "oh, it's smoke and mirrors more than anything else..."

Since it can't really do - for the 99.999% of people that purchase the Airspy, that is - which is claimed I would think they'd have enough sense not to use that in the marketing specs but I guess not.