Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] mimo beam forming on USRP

If you use the phase-resynch feature of the SBX card, and you have common refclock and 1PPS across all your USRPs in the array,
 then you should be OK.

In *general*, synthesized downconverters use fractional-N synthesizers where their starting phase after a re-tune is random with respect to any other synthesizer using the same reference clock.  That's just the way fractional- N synthesis works.  It happens that SBX uses an ADF4351 synthesizer, which has a (rare!) hardware feature to allow phase-resynch after tuning.  In order to make this work, all SBXes in your "array" must be tuned at exactly the same time, so the timed_commands feature must be used to do the tuning.

See:

http://files.ettus.com/manual/page_sync.html

 

 

 

On 2015-03-03 11:05, Pengyu Zhang wrote:

Hi Guys,

 

I am planning to build a mimo system which supports beam forming. Is USRP a good platform for my target? I do not want to use WARP because I need to operate at frequencies lower than 2.4GHz.

 

A potential problem of USRP is phase alignment. As the following doc suggests, phase alignment can be done by MANUALLY tuning the phase. This process can be labor intensive when the number of antennas increases. I am also worried about the problem that the manual phase calibration might need to be done each time you use the mimo system. Is there any approach that can make this process much easier?

 

http://www.ettus.com/content/files/kb/mimo_and_sync_with_usrp_updated.pdf

 

Would be great if you can give me some suggestions about what devices should I use for building a mimo system for beam forming. Thanks.

 

Pengyu

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