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Re:LimeSDR: Flexible, Next-Generation, Open Source Software ... by teamster94 on Monday May 02, 2016 @05:34PM (#11615867)
Throwaway to avoid giving too much away but I have used the AD9364 in a few point to point links at my current employer. Its ADC sampling rate is 640MSPS [1]. This oversampling is important, if not outright necessary for noise shaping, and appropriate baseband filtering. I am not quite sure how the LMS7002 chip can achieve a usable 56MHz channel bandwidth with only 61MSPS.

[1] https://wiki.analog.com/resources/eval/user-guides/ad-fmcomm...

Re:LimeSDR: Flexible, Next-Generation, Open Source Software ... by deutronium on Monday May 02, 2016 @05:55PM (#11616014)
That's very interesting I didn't realise that. So it's oversampling ~10x?

The datasheet for the LMS7002 chip seems to indicate its sample rate is 160 MHz? Which you can grab from:

http://www.limemicro.com/products/field-programmable-rf-ics-...

Re:LimeSDR: Flexible, Next-Generation, Open Source Software ... by teamster94 on Monday May 02, 2016 @07:54PM (#11616787)
They are not using industry standard terms in the datasheet for some reason. I believe the 160MHz is the analog bandwidth of the device. There is no real-time bandwidth (RTBW/IBW) specification, which is the number the defines the widest channel bandwidth of a device. It is likely that the 60MSPS bandwidth can be shifted within that 160MHz analog bandwidth using the on-chip NCO to hop around.
Re:LimeSDR: Flexible, Next-Generation, Open Source Software ... by revelation on Monday May 02, 2016 @07:36PM (#11616694)
Could you elaborate on why oversampling is important? With Nyquist I was generally of the impression that 2 x bandwidth should be just fine, but in practice oscilloscopes (just one example) seem to have five times or more sampling rate than bandwidth.
Re:LimeSDR: Flexible, Next-Generation, Open Source Software ... by lpmay on Monday May 02, 2016 @08:24PM (#11616917)
The Nyquist rate is the theoretical minimum that allows you to distinguish one frequency from another. Sampling a higher frequency will cause an alias component to appear. This means that in practice, there must be analog band-limiting before the signal is sampled to reject any out of band signals before they are aliased to an in-band frequency and cannot be removed. The closer the band limiting cutoff comes to the nyquist frequency the more extreme the roll-off requirements for this band-limiting. Oversampling relaxes the band-limiting requirements, and can also increase the bit depth at lower sample rates. See PDM microphones for an example where this is taken to the extreme.