Hello, I've been lurking around this forum for a while but this is my first post. As such, I'll give a brief background:
I began to collect some screenshots and write up an easy-to-read guide, aimed primarily at hams and others who are new to SDR (like me) who may have been considering the Noctar but were put off by all the hoops, Per Vices' non-existent literature for the beginner, non-existent notoriety and general lack of support. This guide and review would have been my first post here on RadioReference since I don't have a blog or any way to get this stuff out.
I disregarded my gut and ordered the Noctar card from Per Vices about two months ago. The primary goal was to try and ease continuing development of a system my father had been creating for a few years before he became ill. At the moment, it's an unwieldy rat's nest of bread boards, wires, etc but works well and is very likely patent-worthy (the concept, that is). For the past 2 years I've been considering the possibility of porting some or most of the bulk of IC's and discreet signal processing components to the software domain but dreaded learning new programming languages, programming FPGAs, etc. It's bad enough having to decipher my dad's work on paper and trace wires, part numbers and all. Then there's the underlying math...
I had my eye on ordering 3 or 4 USRPs but the price tag put me off especially after taking into consideration the extra cost of daughter boards. After much consideration, I figured out a way to potentially attack this problem one chunk at a time. I decided to order the Noctar as a means to get my 'foot in the door' with Linux, gnuradio, Python/C++ and software DSP in general. I also bought a desktop PC with Intel Core i7 and 32MB ram which the card would call home. For reference, the total cost would have covered a USRP N210 (without daughterboard).The card arrived after about a week (from Canada) and by that time, I'd already set up the Linux box and had all the software installed.
Physical installation was pretty straight forward. The drivers were installed without too much of my hair being pulled out (keep in mind, I'm a new face in the Linux world). After quite a bit of tinkering with gnuradio/GRC and writing the noctar through the SPI, I began to gain some momentum.
Just as I began to get my feet wet with phase 1 of the project, the Noctar's hardware DSP went KAPUT! It took me 2 days to zero in on the problem. That's about the time reality hit home and it really sunk in when emails have gone unanswered for several days. To clarify, the card still outputs samples at full rate. The hardware DSP handles the bulk of down-sampling to a rate which doesn't tax the host computer so much. There are times when a high sample rate is useful but it's nearly impossible to do any real-time signal processing in software when so much of the system's resources are used to down-sample the stream. At the Noctar's full 250MS/S, aliasing is horrible and data becomes corrupted so half the samples MUST be dumped in order to maintain signal integrity. That means the maximum effective sample rate is actually 125MS/S, not 250 like Per Vices advertises. In short, without hardware DSP, the crippled Noctar is useless for my purposes!
Email replies were very prompt when it came to making the sale and little problems that sprung up which I needed help with. Now that the card is malfunctioning and after about a week, I think it's safe to say they're blowing me off and this project is once again stagnant.
Bottom line:
The Noctar is a great concept muddied by poor planning, design and foresight. If you're thinking about embarking on serious SDR, look elsewhere. By now, I would've been chipping away at my project with a USRP and WBX daughterboard but I got tripped up trying to save some money. I'm not a university or corporation! It may be for the better; Ettus has announced some exciting new products they plan to bring to the market soon. There are other small companies entering the scene as well such as Nuand.
Purely Speculation (based on the limited information I have):
The card most likely overheated in spite of providing extra ventilation and installing an extra (optional) fan. For comparison, my graphics card has a heat sink that's bigger than the card, itself. If you look at the Noctar, well, you get the point. This product will probably be swept under the rug like the Phi. PV doesn't even refer to it by name on their website. They call it their 'previous product'.
I'll report back if Per Vices contacts me with anything other than a 'sincere apology'.
Thanks for reading my rant,
Tom
I began to collect some screenshots and write up an easy-to-read guide, aimed primarily at hams and others who are new to SDR (like me) who may have been considering the Noctar but were put off by all the hoops, Per Vices' non-existent literature for the beginner, non-existent notoriety and general lack of support. This guide and review would have been my first post here on RadioReference since I don't have a blog or any way to get this stuff out.
I disregarded my gut and ordered the Noctar card from Per Vices about two months ago. The primary goal was to try and ease continuing development of a system my father had been creating for a few years before he became ill. At the moment, it's an unwieldy rat's nest of bread boards, wires, etc but works well and is very likely patent-worthy (the concept, that is). For the past 2 years I've been considering the possibility of porting some or most of the bulk of IC's and discreet signal processing components to the software domain but dreaded learning new programming languages, programming FPGAs, etc. It's bad enough having to decipher my dad's work on paper and trace wires, part numbers and all. Then there's the underlying math...
I had my eye on ordering 3 or 4 USRPs but the price tag put me off especially after taking into consideration the extra cost of daughter boards. After much consideration, I figured out a way to potentially attack this problem one chunk at a time. I decided to order the Noctar as a means to get my 'foot in the door' with Linux, gnuradio, Python/C++ and software DSP in general. I also bought a desktop PC with Intel Core i7 and 32MB ram which the card would call home. For reference, the total cost would have covered a USRP N210 (without daughterboard).The card arrived after about a week (from Canada) and by that time, I'd already set up the Linux box and had all the software installed.
Physical installation was pretty straight forward. The drivers were installed without too much of my hair being pulled out (keep in mind, I'm a new face in the Linux world). After quite a bit of tinkering with gnuradio/GRC and writing the noctar through the SPI, I began to gain some momentum.
Just as I began to get my feet wet with phase 1 of the project, the Noctar's hardware DSP went KAPUT! It took me 2 days to zero in on the problem. That's about the time reality hit home and it really sunk in when emails have gone unanswered for several days. To clarify, the card still outputs samples at full rate. The hardware DSP handles the bulk of down-sampling to a rate which doesn't tax the host computer so much. There are times when a high sample rate is useful but it's nearly impossible to do any real-time signal processing in software when so much of the system's resources are used to down-sample the stream. At the Noctar's full 250MS/S, aliasing is horrible and data becomes corrupted so half the samples MUST be dumped in order to maintain signal integrity. That means the maximum effective sample rate is actually 125MS/S, not 250 like Per Vices advertises. In short, without hardware DSP, the crippled Noctar is useless for my purposes!
Email replies were very prompt when it came to making the sale and little problems that sprung up which I needed help with. Now that the card is malfunctioning and after about a week, I think it's safe to say they're blowing me off and this project is once again stagnant.
Bottom line:
The Noctar is a great concept muddied by poor planning, design and foresight. If you're thinking about embarking on serious SDR, look elsewhere. By now, I would've been chipping away at my project with a USRP and WBX daughterboard but I got tripped up trying to save some money. I'm not a university or corporation! It may be for the better; Ettus has announced some exciting new products they plan to bring to the market soon. There are other small companies entering the scene as well such as Nuand.
Purely Speculation (based on the limited information I have):
The card most likely overheated in spite of providing extra ventilation and installing an extra (optional) fan. For comparison, my graphics card has a heat sink that's bigger than the card, itself. If you look at the Noctar, well, you get the point. This product will probably be swept under the rug like the Phi. PV doesn't even refer to it by name on their website. They call it their 'previous product'.
I'll report back if Per Vices contacts me with anything other than a 'sincere apology'.
Thanks for reading my rant,
Tom