Discussion

infinitewars: Wild hardware flex for a garage project. Reverse-engineering the Pi 5's MIPI to push 5.6 Gbps from custom MASH sigma-delta ADCs into a Lattice ECP5 FPGA is serious engineering. Getting a 1.5 kW, 240-antenna EME array for $2,499 is also incredibly cheap for this space.Their standalone 4-antenna tiles (https://moonrf.com/updates/) show off some killer apps, like 30 fps spatial RF visualization and NEON-optimized drone video interception.I'm rolling my eyes at the "Agentic Transceiver" part, though. It is highly doubtful that an onboard AI casually writes, debugs, and compiles a real-time C app with analog video color sync recovery in an hour.

diimdeep: [delayed]

HNisCIS: I'm struggling to understand the signal chain or antenna architecture here. If those two MAX chips are 2829s this would be 2x2 mimo per tile but I'm not super familiar with that product line and the PCB layout looks like a 4x4 setup.And yeah, the agentic stuff is dumb, I've played a ton with doing low level SDR work on Opus 4.6 and it's truly ass.Also, the "can't radar, plz don't ITAR" is horseshit. Some basic fw tweaks and you could get this to be, at the very least, a sweet FMCW setup.

jcalvinowens: > Getting a 1.5 kW, 240-antenna EME arrayIt says 1W TX power per antenna. So the 240 antenna array which draws 1500W has a transmit power of 240W.

HNisCIS: EIRP. There's some gain involved.