Airspy

airspy_topAirspy

Airspy is an advanced software defined radio receiver capable of sampling 10MHz of spectrum anywhere between 24MHz and 1.7GHz – and even beyond with extensions. It all started when we needed a good performing receiver that’s still affordable but could not find a good solution in the market, so we designed ours. We believe that as of today, Airspy is the only serious wide band receiver solution that’s high performance and yet affordable.

Technical specifications:

  • Continuous 24 – 1750 MHz RX range with no gaps
  • 3.5 dB NF between 42 and 1002 MHz
  • Tracking RF filters
  • 35dBm IIP3 RF front end
  • 12bit ADC @ 20 MSPS (80dB Dynamic Range, 64dB SNR, 10.4 ENOB) – Yeah, size does matter.
  • Up to 80 MSPS for custom applications
  • Cortex M4F @ up to 204MHz with Multi Core support (dual M0)
  • 1.5 ppm high precision, low phase noise clock
  • 1 RTC clock (for packet time-stamping)
  • External clock input (10 MHz to 100 MHz via MCX connector) – Ideal for phase coherent radios
  • 10 MHz panoramic spectrum view with 9MHz alias/image free
  • IQ or Real, 16bit fixed or 32bit float output streams
  • No IQ imbalance, DC offset or 1/F noise at the center of the spectrum that plagues all the other SDRs
  • Extension ports: 16 x SGPIO
  • 1 x RF Input (SMA)
  • 1 x RF Output (Loopthrough, U-FL)
  • 2 x High Speed ADC inputs (up to 80 MSPS, U-FL)
  • 4.5v software switched Bias-Tee to power LNA’s and up/down-converters

AirSpy Pin Assignment
AirSpy first release.

AirSpy R2
AirSpy second release, R2.

Possible usages:

  • Spectrum Analyzer,
  • Fast scanner,
  • Radio surveillance,
  • Direction Finding,
  • Passive Radars,
  • ADS-B,
  • FM Radio,
  • Analog TV,
  • Digital Terrestrial TV,
  • Ham Radio,
  • Two way communication services

Supported Software:

Planned support:

Supported platforms:

  • Windows Vista, 7, 8 and 8.1 (XP works but it has been deprecated by Microsoft)
  • Linux
  • *BSD
  • OSX

Minimum hardware requirements:

  • Intel i3 2.4 GHz CPU or equivalent
  • 2GB of RAM (to run your own OS, airspy barely needs 1MB of memory)
  • High speed USB 2.0 controller

Developer API:

  • Open source multi-platform libairspy at github
  • Linux kernel SDR API (by Antti Palosaari) at github

FAQ

Ubuntu 14.04 and the following error message when inserting the AirSpy in to an USB port. ” airspy: probe of 2-1.1:1.0 failed with error -75″ you can solve this when you add the following to /etc/modprobe.d/airspy-blacklist.conf:

#
# Block AirSpy kernel module from loading
#
blacklist airspy
#

airspy_caseHomepage and other references:

Airspy main website.