One more low-cost Zynq SoC dev board, from a reader/spelunker designing SDR cave radios

By Xilinx sleibso ‎, Mar. 29, 2017 – A blog post from earlier this week, "Seven low-cost Zynq dev and training boards: a quick review," prompted an email from Graham Naylor in the UK. Naylor informed me that I'd not mentioned his favorite Zynq-based board, the Trenz TE0722, in that blog post-and then he told me how he's using the Trenz board (which is really more of a low-cost SOM rather than a training/dev board). During the day, Naylor measures neutron pulses from an ionization chamber using the Zynq-based Red Pitaya open instrumentation platform. (I've written many blogs about the Red Pitaya, listed below.) For fun, it appears that Naylor and colleague Pete Allwright design cave radios. If you've never heard of a cave radio, you're in good company because I hadn't either.

Naylor sent me a preprint of an article that will appear in the quarterly BCRA's Cave Radio & Electronics Group Journal, in the June 2017 issue. (The BCRA is the British Cave Research Association.) Naylor's and Allwright's article, titled "Outlining the Architecture of the Nicola 3Z Cave Radio," discusses the design of a new version of the Nicola 3 rescue radio designed to be used by cave rescue teams for underground communications.

The original Nicola 3 radio was based on a Xilinx Spartan-3E FPGA supplied on a module from OHO Elektronik. The FPGA implemented an SDR design for a radio that performs SSB modulation and demodulation using an 87KHz carrier wave. Radio transmission does not occur through the air but through the ground using a couple of electrodes jammed into the earthen floor of the cave. (We're in a cave, remember?) A little water poured on the earth interface helps improve transmission/reception.

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