ADALM-PLUTO

The PLUTO is an AD936x transceiver on a small board, and WaveShark talks to it the way it prefers to be talked to, over iiod. That works on the USB cable, where the board appears as a network adapter, or across the network to a PLUTO sitting at the antenna.

It is full duplex, so a transmit channel and a receive span run at once. The link carries up to 4 MS/s, which is the span to plan around rather than the chip’s own figure, and it is enough for voice, packet, pagers and every narrowband transmit protocol here.

The stock range is 325 MHz to 3.8 GHz; boards told they carry an AD9364 reach 70 MHz to 6 GHz, and WaveShark reads whichever range the board reports.

What it reaches

• Transmit and receive at once, from one small board
• A radio at the mast reached over Ethernet or USB networking
• Every narrowband decoder above its lower tuning limit

What it will not do

• Spans over 4 MHz: no Wi-Fi, television or wide LTE carriers
• Below 325 MHz on a stock board
• Not in the browser version, which has no socket to reach iiod

Setup

Plugged in, it is found on USB and opened at 192.168.2.1; a PLUTO elsewhere on the network is added by its address. The gain table and the transmit level are in the radio dialog.