If you haven’t heard, Analog Devices has a new evaluation board for their AD9363 Transceiver, the PlutoSDR. It’s currently in manufacturing and expected to ship sometime in early May.
Why buy now? They have an introductory price of $99USD ( $145 CAD at digikey ). Regular price is $149USD
Why would I want this device?
Full-duplex Tx&Rx
Continuous coverage from 325Mhz to 3.8Ghz
20Mhz bandwidth ( RTL-SDR is 3.2Mhz max )
It has a Xilinx Zynq 7Z010 fpga on-board (ARM-9 667Mhz + 28k FPGA blocks and 80 DSP slices for signal processing )
Drawbacks?
Only supports USB2 which is not enough for the bandwidth of the device. However the processor and FPGA fabric should allow you to offload the signal processing from your computer to the SDR, reducing the need for bulk raw data transfers. It also has 512MB of ram which could be used to record radio bursts and then download them to the PC at USB2 speeds.
I plan to order one from Digikey (other option is to buy directly from Analog Devices, but shipping is $24USD ).
At this price, with this features, I suspect the first batch is going to sell out.
PlutoSDR wiki
PlutoSDR Spec sheet (pdf)
If there is enough interest, I could ask Digikey to see if there is a volume discount.