Ben,

I have tried injecting both a 50.0 MHz and a 50.1 MHz tone and setting the USRP 
with a center frequency of 50 MHz and a sampling rate of 1 MSps. The signal 
generator I am using is clocked with the same 10 MHz reference as the USRP 
(octoclock). I am currently setting the digital gain to zero (though I have 
tried a number of different values with no noticeable differences in terms of 
this non-linearity to input power). I have also tried inserting a LO offset, 
but haven’t had any real success with that either (outside of removing the 
small peak at DC). I tried disabling the DC offset but that didn’t do anything 
either.

Looking in the time domain at the IQ for each of the channels I see two things 
which appear strange to me. First, when I set the USRP center frequency to the 
same frequency as my tone (50 MHz) I would expect a flat line, but instead I 
see a triangular wave with a non-zero amplitude (actually it is quite large). 
When I offset the frequencies I see a very noisy sinusoid which has the wave on 
it. As the power increases, the channels scale evenly in both noise and 
intensity, but at a threshold power level (~45 dBm) it appears as though 
leakage occurs between the main sinusoidal wave and this secondary carrier 
signal.

[cid:[email protected]]

Thoughts? Thanks for taking the time to look at this.

-Andrew

From: Ben Hilburn [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Friday, November 21, 2014 7:36 PM
To: Daigle, Andrew - 1008 - MITLL
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Inconsistant Gain in X310

Hi Andrew -

What you describe is very strange. There is nothing in the USRP that changes 
dynamically based on the input power level (there isn't even AGC). The only 
thing I can think of is that somehow the built-in DC offset calibration is 
going haywire. Are you setting the center frequency directly to the frequency 
of your input signal? If you tune with an LO offset, do you see the same 
behavior?

Another question: what is your signal source? Can you lock the USRP and your 
signal source to the same reference, and then tune such that your input signal 
is directly "over an FFT bin"? Do you still see different behavior between the 
two channels?

Also, the decimation is done in the FPGA, and must be the same for each channel.

Cheers,
Ben

On Fri, Nov 21, 2014 at 7:17 AM, Daigle, Andrew - 1008 - MITLL 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Hello,

I am running into a small issue with the X310 USRP. My basic setup involves 
receiving from two antennas (or at this point CW tones from signal generators) 
using two basic RX daughter cards.

My problem is that when I pump in a -50 dBm CW tone to channel A the FFT plot 
makes sense in that it is stable with an expected value (floor ~-117 dB and 
peak -62 dB). As the signal increases the peak increases accordingly (i/e for a 
-40 dBm CW tone I see a floor of ~-117 dB and a peak of -52 dB). This is 
consistent all the way up to -20 dBm (I didn’t want to get too close to the -15 
dBm limit written on the outside of the USRP). When I move this signal into 
channel B its FFT mirrors channel A at an input of -50 dBm, but as soon the 
signal is increased past -45 dBm the noise floor starts jumping from ~117 dB to 
~93 dB rapidly and the peak jumps and stays stable 14 dB higher (-38 dB vs -52 
dB for the same -40 dBm). Below a -50 dBm input; however, everything is 
identical between the two channels. I was thinking maybe the decimation rate is 
changing on the second channel based on the input power (but for some reason 
not the first). The thing is I am using code loosely based on the 
rx_multi_samples example and I don’t know if there is a way to specify the 
decimation rate of each of the daughter-cards as if I was using GNU radio 
companion (or even if this is even the cause of my problem and I should be 
looking elsewhere).

Any thoughts? Thanks!

-Andrew


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