RF product - moRFeus - frequency converter and signal generator

Konrad, many thanks for your valued info… much appreciated.
Terry

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I did a little looking online …

“Ka-Band”

“The U.S. Army plans to use SOTM terminals over DoD’s Wideband Global Satellite Communications (WGS) satellites operating at X- and Ka-bands.”

Vijitha Weerackody and Enrique G. Cuevas, “Technical Challenges and Performance
of Satellite Communications on-the-Move Systems”, JOHNS HOPKINS APL TECHNICAL DIGEST, VOLUME 30, NUMBER 2 (2011)
http://techdigest.jhuapl.edu/techdigest/TD/td3002/Weerackody.pdf

–Konrad

Hi Terry,

Many thanks for the infos you provided. I was not able to achieve the L-Band test pass through moRFeus, you did. So it’s very good news as starting point.
Not 100% sure but on the 2.2 GHz band, there is also telemetry from ISS, (and Dragon spacecraft). I’ll try to find more about this.
This week will be very busy for me, but hope to take enough time to make some progress on the next days or next week.

This might be it:
Telemetry Downlink – 2287.5 MHz

–Konrad

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Zarya:

–Konrad

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Well, I’ve tried and tried. I have a 2.4GHz TP-LINK grid dish up on my AZ/EL rotor and an S-Band LNA, a further filtered LNA. I can receive Inmarsats very strong, when I use the moRFeus with 1GHz setting I can still receive them fine at f - 1GHz. But still nothing on S-Band, not a thing, not even an extremely weak signal (with doppler for LEO sats). I’m beginning to doubt the abilities and usefulness of this device.

What is the signal bandwidth that moRFeus can support?

Newton,
If I understand you correctly, moRFeus is a wideband device. It will down convert any RF at it’s input according to the figure set under the ‘Frequency’ menu. I’m trying to use it with an Airspy SDR.
Terry

So if I have a 20 MHz wide signal or a 200 MHz wide signal it will converter either just as easily?

Newton,
Yes, that’s correct. The only limitation in that respect is the bandwidth of the SDR it’s connect to.
Terry

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@Abhishek, assuming you’re the right person to ask, I know the source is closed but is it possible to get an armv7l neon build of the morfeus_tool? I don’t think I would need a Xilinx-specific build, so the generic arm-linux-gnueab compiler should be fine. This build would then run on the PlutoSDR (and maybe pi1?) and I would include it (with permission?) in my PlutoWeb project. Can find it on github if interested. We would be able to have our web front end control and report status on the morfeus device, all running self-contained on the PlutoSDR arm cpu. :slight_smile: Thanks in advance for your consideration!

Example cmake toolchain file:
SET(MULTIARCH “arm-linux-gnueabi”)
SET(CMAKE_SYSTEM_NAME “Linux”)
SET(CMAKE_SYSTEM_PROCESSOR “armv7”)
SET(CMAKE_C_COMPILER arm-xilinx-linux-gnueabi-gcc)
SET(CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER arm-xilinx-linux-gnueabi-g++)

The ADALM-PLUTO sdr is very cool. Just got mine last month still learning how to use it. I hadn’t thought of using the moRFeus with it… The possibilities are still in the formative stage.

With a ‘modded’ pluto already having a ‘wider view’ of the spectrum than the morfeus does it won’t be so much helpful to pull in otherwise ‘out of view’ signals, instead I am thinking of using it as an on-the-fly kind of tuner in conjunction with OpenWebRx. OpenWebRx requires a restart to change the center frequency, using the morfeus I could tune without a restart. Always looking for things to add to the PlutoWeb project so let me know if you come up with some ideas!

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is this build:

https://archive.othernet.is/morfeus_tool_v1.6/morfeus_tool_linux_armv7

not working for you?

That binary works just fine on the older dreamcatcher running armbian as well as a pi3 running raspbian. Just not the Pluto - out of the box. Had to do some tweaking.

Your binary:
morfeus_tool_linux_armv7: ELF 32-bit LSB shared object, ARM, EABI5 version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib/ld-linux-armhf.so.3, for GNU/Linux 3.2.0, BuildID[sha1]=e27bb090add32d089365b1702959c80e780a137d, stripped

A binary build as a result of compiling a pluto fw image:
busybox: setuid ELF 32-bit LSB executable, ARM, EABI5 version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib/ld-linux.so.3, for GNU/Linux 2.6.32, stripped

A binary I cross-compiled for the Pluto:
SoapySDRServer: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, ARM, EABI5 version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib/ld-linux.so.3, for GNU/Linux 2.6.32, with debug_info, not stripped

If I fake the missing interpreter with a link, I then seem to be missing udev:
/root/morfeus_tool_linux_armv7: error while loading shared libraries: libudev.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

If I add eudev to the firmware and rebuild it:
Could not find Morfeus device. Run as root/Administrator?

So looks like I’m on my way, need to come up with an OTG USB HUB or something to test this all out though. Thanks for the nudge! :slight_smile: No build needed!

Has anybody been successful in getting the moRFeus to down convert from S-Band or higher ? I can get it to work fine down converting L-Band but it simply won’t work for me on S-Band. I would appreciate any advice from an othernet expert on how I can get this to work. Otherwise, perhaps it will be the first unit on ebay ?
Many thanks.

I have not messed with it recently, but I had no problem with down converting half-way into the C-band (4GHz - 6 GHz). I’m pretty sure it works in the S-Band (2 to 4 GHz). I find that the RTL-SDR are more sensitive around 1 GHz than they are at 1.5-1.7 GHz. I have a LNA/filter for 1090 MHz, So I’ve used it as an IF amp and filter there and tuned near 1090 MHz

–Konrad.

Hi,
I made a big update for moRFeus_GUI tool.
Rewrite, fixes, improved features. Unique script for both Linux and Rpi platforms.
Nothing really new but more stable and filled few gaps.
Added a youtube video
Link remains the same : GitHub - LamaBleu/moRFeus_GUI: control your moRFeus device from your Linux-computer or Raspberry Pi
Just in case, the initial version which worked until now is still available in initial-april2018 branch
Enjoy :sunglasses:

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Are there any apps for MoRFeus that run under Windows ?

sure, you can pick the windows type too here: https://archive.othernet.is/morfeus_tool_v1.6/
(However its not GUI but command line tool)