FUNCube Dongle development status

Howard Long, G6LVB, reports that he is enormously gratified by the large volume of interest shown the FUNcube Dongle over the past few weeks. With so much interest being shown, Howard took some time to provide an update about the development progress.

The FUNcube Dongle was originally designed to be an accessible way to be able to receive amateur satellites, most notably AMSAT-UK's forthcoming FUNcube cubesat
(http://www.funcube.org.uk).

What does accessible mean? Essentially we mean both low cost and easy to setup. The original target market is, and remains, what Howard calls, "the unconverted", those,
particularly in education, who need a means of being able to practically introduce and demonstrate real space technology in a hands-on way.

When the work on FUNcube was distributed, Howard
was given the task of coming up with the ground segment, and the result is the FUNcube Dongle.

As it's tuned out, the FUNcube Dongle has the added bonus that it's a VHF/UHF and low microwave equivalent to the well-known Softrock in an integrated plug and play package. The intention is to have two models, an entry-level frequency-restricted version targeted at the educational market, and a full blown Pro version that seems to piqued the interest of many radio amateurs, radio astronomers and short wave listeners.

In précis, it includes an integrated front end filter, LNA, quatrature LO, zero-IF quadrature downconverter, dual 16 bit ADC and USB soundcard. In it's simplest of forms, it's SMA in, USB out. It's also compatible with pretty much any software that works for the Softrock, for example LinRad,
Spectravue, M0KGK and Rocky.

The passband is 96kHz, tuneable from 64MHz to 1,700MHz. The tuning is via a USB HID interface meaning that as well as your favourite soundcard SDR program, you'll need a little app supplied with the FUNcube Dongle to control the centre frequency or you'll end up only listening to Howard's
favorite FM broadcast station ;-)

It's also compatible with XP, Vista, Windows 7 in 32 bit and Vista and Windows 7 in 64 bit. Initial testing on the Mac and Ubuntu 32 and 64 bit shows compatibility too, however the frequency control application for those platforms has not been written yet.

So, no USB drivers are required!

To keep people informed going forward, a blog has been established at: http://www.funcubedongle.com/.

Here is a video of the first pre-production unit:

Projected availability of the first production batch of the Pro version is December 2010. Pricing is subject to assembly costs, but to give you indicative pricing we are working on an initial price of the Pro version to be circa USD150/GBP100.

Howard, G6LVB

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