Low-cost MIMO SDR platform designed for a large band of spectrum monitoring

Crowd Supply XYNC Octo is a low-cost MIMO SDR platform is designed for situations or use cases that comprise a large band of spectrum monitoring or massive MIMO systems. The platform is essentially a motherboard for joining XTRX boards together, producing a multi-channel SDR.

The platform is equipped with eight removable XTRX boards, metal installation brackets, cables for the TX/RX ports and the GPS port, and a special board for synchronising the XTRX units. Each onboard XTRX gives two transmit channels and two receive channels. Thus, the platform provides eight transmit channels at 30MHz to 3.7GHz, and eight receive channels at 1.8GHz to 6GHz. Two boards can be joined together to expand the number of RX/TX channels, or to enhance throughput per channel. Connecting more than two boards is also achievable but needs an external clock and 1pps signal distribution circuitry.

On the digital side, each XTRX unit is connected to a PCIe switch that multiplexes the XTRX PCIe lanes into a single PCIe 2.0 x4 connector.

Typical applications include massive MIMO systems, monitor massive amounts of bandwidth, LTE cellular, software-defined 2G/3G/4G modems, drones and embedded systems, and DSP acceleration.