What do you get when you cross an ARM-based Linux PC as well as an RTL-SDR? seems like the begin of a joke, however the response is Outernet’s Dreamcatcher. It is a single PCB with an RTL-SDR software application defined radio, an L-band LNA, as well as an Allwinner A13 processor with 512MB of RAM as well as a 1 GHz clock speed. The rtl-sdr site just recently published a great evaluation of the $99 board.
We’ll let you checked out the evaluation for yourself, however the final thought was that in spite of some bugs, the board was no a lot more costly than pulling the parts together separately. On the other hand, if you uses, for example, a Raspberry Pi 3, you may expect a lot more support as well as a lot more performance.
Despite the L-band hardware, there is a bypass antenna jack that enables you to get other frequencies. There’s likewise two SD slots, one to boot from as well as one more for storage. a number of pieces of software application had difficulty running on the somewhat sluggish CPU, although some software application that is optimized for the specific processor utilized fared better. You can checked out the details in the review.
The board is interesting, although unless you have a special packaging problem, you are most likely also off to integrate a Pi as well as a dongle, as we have seen so lots of times before. If you have a lot more horsepower you can even make the Pi transmit, although we’d suggest some filtering if you were going to do that for real.
