Antenna for FPGA

[fiko301]

Hello,

I am doing software defined radio with FPGA. I have an altera de0 nano board. I need to connect an antenna to receive fm radio signals(88-100 Mhz). However it is my first time to use this board. There are 8 analog inputs pin. Do you have a recommendation for antenna? And if I want to use simple wire antenna how can I connect it?

Thank you all in advance.

[zygot]

2 hours ago, fiko301 said:

I have an altera de0 nano board. I need to connect an antenna to receive fm radio signals(88-100 Mhz).

I happen to think that the Terasic De0 Nano is a great little FPGA platform for many projects and suitable for almost every budget. You aren't going to connect an antenna to any of the FPGA pins or the ADC chip and have an SDR. Your first assignment is to read about currently available SDR modules and understand what it is that they do. There are a lot of them available these days. Before they changed the WWVB modulation scheme creating a radio controlled clock would have been an interesting, but advanced, project for this board... but you'd still need some components between the antenna and the FPGA or ADC chip.

[D@n]

@zygot,

Have you looked at the ULX3S board at all?  It comes with an integrated antenna for 433MHz already designed into the board.  As far as I can tell, they just wired it directly to the board.  I'm not sure if they intended to use it for receive as well as transmit, but sure enough that's what they built.   As for receive vs transmit, transmit is the easy one.  No need to worry about voltages or voltage standards, just dump the pin directly into the antenna.  Oh, wait, you wanted it to get good performance?  Now that's another task. 

Dan

[zygot]

12 hours ago, D@n said:

As for receive vs transmit, transmit is the easy one.

Well, plenty of electronics PCBs come with lots of transmitters already on board. Some are certainly capably of injecting noticeable levels of noise into the FM radio spectrum. I've had some success in this myself, until I corrected my mistakes. The socially acceptable use for an SDR is to not cause interference, and most are well designed to mitigate unwanted EMI. But your point is well taken. Doing something that's uncontrolled and unintended isn't really, by definition,  a good example of an engineering project.  

I do have an SDI camera that I like a lot, except for the EMI that it produces. By the way there are laws against producing, selling, or using such poorly designed devices in most places around the world.