Month: January 2022

For my next video, I thought I’d investigate the topic of SDR – software-defined radio. My career started in wireless, mainly thanks to my hobby of amateur radio. I initially trained as a Merchant Navy radio officer and worked for BP on big supertankers. I’ve had plenty of experience with traditional RF engineering techniques but have wanted to explore and get ‘hands-on’ with SDR and related topics for a while.

This is the first in a series of videos about SDR. After a short introduction to SDR, I unbox the ADALM-PLUTO from Analog Devices.

Subsequent videos will explore popular modulation techniques and practical receiver & transmitter designs. Along the way, we’ll also cover aspects of antenna design, measuring return loss, and investigate communication through the amateur radio QO-100 satellite.

Vast armies of sensors are crucial to feeding IIoT monitoring and analysis applications. Powering these edge nodes is increasingly a channel. Even though modern microcontrollers exhibit ultra-low power consumption characteristics, a battery would need to be replaced at some stage, the total cost of which is typically more than the sensor. Provisioning line/mains power infrastructure is equally expensive.

How about energy harvesting? Could this provide a viable power source? What about harvesting ambient RF energy?

In this video, we investigate the potential for powering IIoT sensors using this approach.