Nothing in the USRP will be damaged. It's up to you to ensure that your subsequent RF chain will handle it. There are a few, rare configurations which come to mind where it would be a Bad Thing to suddenly pulse power on a millisecond timescale with extremely high bandwidth.
1. Using your USRP to drive a linear accelerator (don't laugh, it's been done) 2. Using your USRP to drive an extremely high power tube-based AM transmitter 3. Using your USRP to drive an amplifier which is not unconditionally stable Outside of these you're probably fine. Nick On Tue, Mar 3, 2020 at 3:21 PM Marcus D. Leech via USRP-users < [email protected]> wrote: > On 03/03/2020 06:16 PM, Sam Reiter via USRP-users wrote: > > 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 > > I'd have to agree with Sam here. > > An underflow on the TX will just mean that whatever the DAC last saw will > be presented to the analog interface during the underflow period. > Which means perhaps a few microseconds of no level change coming out of > the DAC. Not a problem at all, as far as I know. > > The main thing is to optimize your code/computer-hardware to prevent them. > > > _______________________________________________ > USRP-users mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.ettus.com/mailman/listinfo/usrp-users_lists.ettus.com >
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