Software Controlled Radio Receiver for Versatile Wireless Communications

In this paper is presented the design and the implementation of a software controlled reconfigurable receiver that is intended to be used for wireless communications using analogue or digital modulation techniques. The hardware part of the system is realized around the specialized circuits RTL2832U and R820T2 which together forms a wideband radio receiver with an extended frequency domain of operation, ranging from 42MHz to 1000MHz. The versatility of the proposed equipment is achieved by using a novel architecture based on the software defined radio technology. The digital signal processing of the received signals is realized with a sampling frequency of 2,56Ms/s at a resolution of 8 bits. Through the USB interface, the receiver module is controlled by a computer that runs a proprietary Labview application. By using a very flexible configuration based on high performance circuits and software defined radio architecture, the proposed receiver represents a reliable solution for many applications including data transmission in wireless sensor networks or personal communications.