Low cost digital transceiver design for Software Defined Radio using RTL-SDR

The field of wireless communication has become the hottest area and Software Defined Radio (SDR) is revolutionizing it. By bringing much functionality as software, SDR reduces the cost of hardware maintenance and up-gradation. Open source hardware such as USRP (Universal Software Radio Peripheral) and software called GNU Radio-Companion are commonly used to do experiments in SDR. Since the cost of USRP is high, a low cost set up is needed which is affordable by the student community. In this paper a low cost alternative to USRP is proposed using RTL-SDR (Realtek Software Defined Radio) which is only used for reception. For transmitting purpose, a mixer circuit can be used to map the baseband signal to the band that can be received by RTL-SDR on the other end on Linux / Windows platform. Initially, the experiment is done in simulation. After that, it is tested with low cost hardware such as mixer and RTL-SDR. The cost for total transceiver system can be less than USD 100 which is 10 times less than the existing one.