BladeRF

The FPGA-based bladeRF SDR is offered by Nuand of San Francisco. The line includes:

Model	Price
bladeRF 2.0 micro xA9	$720
bladeRF 2.0 micro xA4	$480
bladeRF x115	$650
bladeRF x40	$420

The underlying FPGAs are not fully utilized by the radio software itself, and can thus be extended by the user. Additional products include the XB-200 LF/MF/HF/VHF transverter for lower-range work, the XB-300 amplifier/LNA, and the XB-100 GPIO expansion board. These only work with the x115/x40.

The libbladeRF repository contains the sources necessary for working with bladeRF. Clone this repository with the --recursive option to acquire submodules. FPGA blobs can be acquired at Nuand's site. No kernel driver is necessary; libbladeRF works directly with USB devices using libusb.

Preparing the FPGA

Upon attaching a new bladeRF, the bladeRF-cli REPL will confirm that no firmware is present:

bladeRF> version

  bladeRF-cli version:        1.7.1-git-896d2431
  libbladeRF version:         2.2.0-git-896d2431

  Firmware version:           2.3.2
  FPGA version:               Unknown (FPGA not loaded)

bladeRF>