Hey Francisco, Interesting question. I remember reading this when it was initially posted, giving it some thought, and promptly forgetting to respond. It's a question that is difficult to give a "yes" or "no" to. Similar to statistics, I think the answer to this question only comes by disproving the null hypothesis that "no part of the signal chain is damaged with an underflow". If you can't prove that damage will occur, then you're probably in the clear, but you also can't be positive that the null hypothesis is true. That being said, I don't think underflows are bad for the hardware in any way.
An underflow is typically caused when a bottleneck on the host side prevents data from filling USRP buffers quickly enough to be pushed through the DAC at the requested rate. As I see it, the only place in the signal chain that *might* exhibit unexpected behavior in the face of samples not being present would be at the DAC (don't ask me why, but that would be my best guess). The way UHD operates, the DAC and ADC are initialized and running as soon as the streamer objects in UHD are initialized, and they sit there processing nothing (similar to an underflow state) until a TX stream command from the host tells the USRP radio core to release it's queued samples to the converter(s). Maybe that was all nonsense. In any case, I wouldn't worry about radio damage, I'd worry about fixing your underflows :) Best, Sam Reiter On Tue, Feb 11, 2020 at 6:32 AM Francisco Albani via USRP-users < [email protected]> wrote: > Hi! > > I've been using USRPs many years yet it never occurred to me to ask that > question. > > Of course one should avoid using an application in a regime of many > underflows, BUT, just for the sake of the question suppose I came up with a > setup that does what I want while throwing a lot of them, are there any > implications to the weariness of any piece of hardware? For example turning > on and off the TX chain. > > Will a radiation environment change the conclusion? > > Bye and thanks for your help! > > Francisco. > _______________________________________________ > USRP-users mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.ettus.com/mailman/listinfo/usrp-users_lists.ettus.com >
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