[Hackrf-dev] HackRF-dev Digest, Vol 42, Issue 18

[McDonald, J Douglas]

"I am an Ham radio and user of an HackRF One in France.
I am looking for several weeks on web if everybody has developped some RF test equipements based on HackRF One."

I've tried, with some temporary success, later failure. The problem is probably the software. The available
source code seems to be mostly written for Linux instead of Windows. 

I wanted to make a sweep generator with various modes. I never ever got the drivers to interface to a plain C program ... 
the documantation is simply non-existant. I eventually got gnu-radio to work just fine
for receive in Windows7, but never ever got transmnit to do anything correctly and reliably, 
and in any event gnu-radio is completely inadequate for most tasks. When I went
to Windows 10 the receive functions continue to work fine. I have no speed problems
in receive. Both my Airspy and my HackRF will happily write data, at full hardware speed,
to disk using SDRSharp.. 100% reliable.
 

I eventually got a working sweep generator  by generating a file with the data
and playing it with hackrf-transfer.exe. This is klunky but worked OK in Windows 7. 
The hardware I have ... an absolute top of the line Dell Dimension XPS ... works fine. 

When I went to Windows 10 the hackrf-transfer  program started dropping packets 
possibly (but not verified! ) at  file rewinds. Of course, if I could get a plain C program to work this would not be
a problem because I could read the file into a statric buffer and just play it in a circle. 
But I can't even begin to do that ... there is no useful documentation. Believe me I tried.

And nobody seems to want to help.  

The Hackrf hardware is nowhere near good enough for "professional quality" 
test stuff as the built in anti-aliasing filters are very poor. I get a useful bandwidth of 
6 to 9 MHz by measuring the response and correcting it in software. Even with the dropped
packet glitches it does however work fine for what I use it.  8 bits is rather restrictive for
receive, but for test waveform transmit it is just fine. That's what I bought it for. The niggling
problems are just so infuriating. 

Doug McDonald