Hi,
First, thank you for Pluto! I think it's great, and it's a very affordable way to learn SDR.
After some initial tests with Gnu-Radio, I went for IIO and tried to run a simple test of TX + RX with digital loopback enabled. I would like to send a TX buffer and receive it into RX buffer. Maybe in the end I would like to get a simple VNA scenario to work. I have some issues I can't resolve. So first I will write my questions and then I will explain the details.
- How should I call IIO push/refill functions from a single thread (or I shouldn't do that)? My RX buffer gets "chopped" and filled with zeros.
- Can I synchronize TX/RX in such a way that I will know what is a delay between buffers (in terms of number of samples)?
The scenario I run is:
1. Open RX and TX on the same LO frequency with the same sampling rate.
2. Create channels/buffers needed.
3. Enable digital loopback.
4. Prepare a sinewave using inverse fft.
5. Push TX buffer, refill RX buffer in a loop. Currently 20 iterations.
6. Catch 10th iteration RX buffer into an array, so I can analyze it later. The idea is that it should contain TX buffer, OR TX buffer shifted by some constant offset + beginning of next TX buffer. Catching 10th iteration should neglect any effects of first/last buffers.
7. Print TX and 10th RX buffer for comparison.
(Additionally I calculate amplitude+phase of both TX and RX).
Code used: https://github.com/mikuslaw/iio/blob/master/main.c
Link it with v3 FFTW and IIO, obviously.
What I get:
https://github.com/mikuslaw/iio/blob/master/test.txt
As you may see in the file, the RX is offset by around 10k samples. RX contains samples starting from 10k upto 32k of TX and then 10k zeros. I didn't expect zeros there! Any ideas why is that?
Should I call push/refill from two threads for it to work? I thought that there were some internal buffers that are swapped with the buffer I push/refill so that would be short call. I know that refill/push calls may block, but is that the issue here?
Another thing: Can I synchronize TX/RX so I have a constant phase shift? It changes every time I run the code.
NOTE: In the code I use 1/4th of RX buffer to calculate amplitude/phase to reduce the "zeros" effect on those, but it's not a solution of the root cause.
