I would not want to discourage ambition, but my experience tells me you
are
biting off more than you need to chew. Unless, of course, you want to
immediately go into business with your own start-up following
graduation.
A project such as you describe might take a multi-disciplined (EE, ME,
PCB,
SW/DSP) of about 5 people 6-12 months of full-time effort. Just a
working
breadboard could take 2-3 people about 3 months full time.
The availability of the Prism (tm) chip set from Intersil (formerly
Harris)
certainly makes things much easier than when I went through this design
effort 4 years ago, but it is still major. For an undergraduate project,
I'd
back off to something doable. How about not using spread spectrum, just
a
simple FSK system, at low power? Also, it would be easier to get working
at
a much lower frequency than 2400 MHz. Consider the 72-76 MHz., 216-220
MHz,
or 902-928 MHz. Look at the FCC Rules Part 5 for frequencies for
educational
experimental projects. You will need an FCC Experimental License to
operate
any of these projects legally, unless you're a ham and do it in a ham
band.
Finally, if you do go ahead with SS, the FCC rules limit transmitter
power
output to 1 Watt, not 5 Watts. And, there's nothing that says you have
to
operate at a full 1 Watt.
Good luck.
Jacob Z. Schanker, P.E.
Director of Agency Compliance
Adaptive Broadband Corporation
175 Science Parkway
Rochester, NY 14620 USA
+716 242 8454 (voice)
+716 241 5590 (fax)
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
----------
From: David Enchelmaier [SMTP:[email protected]]
Sent: Monday, October 11, 1999 9:53 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [SI-LIST] : Spread spectrum project
Hi
I'm going into my 4th (final) year of a B. Eng
(Aerospace/Avionics). One of the projects I'm
considering is a 2.4-2.6GHz spread spectrum system.
The system cannot output more than 5W, and will be
used primarily for digital video transmission. It may
be necessary in the future for this system to transmit
multiple data streams (ie video, telemetry, control).
The project also requires the design and construction
of patch antennae for the Tx and Rx. I have two
questions.
Firstly, does this project appear reasonable? There
are other, easier projects available for me to do if
this is too difficult, or unlikely to be finished in
time.
Secondly, if I do decide to do it, what sort of
problems am I likely to encounter? Just general
things like propagation, track width, antenna size
etc.
Any help is greatly appreciated
Dave
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