Want a really BIG satellite radio?

JKoltner

New Member
Sep 16, 2010
11
3
3
Here's a blast from the past... this is a picture of an early Sirius radio receiver prototype, likely built some time in the late '90s:

Sirius1.jpg


Signal flow is pretty much from the top of the rack to the bottom... although radios today stop at the "Hard Rain" board with audio output and then add a small microcontroller that interfaces to your head unit or whatever (via the so-called Sirius Streaming Protocol); the "Cloud" board in this prototype provided a Ethernet-connected web-based interface to the unit.

Here's a block diagram showing how it all hooked together -- although it doesn't appear to be 100% "in sync" with this particular hardware prototype, so it was probably drawn for a slightly different prototype:

Sirius2.png


(The satellites use TDM, whereas the ground repeaters use OFDM.)

For comparison purposes, here's what the guts of the current SC-C1 look like:

Sirius3.jpg

Sirius4.jpg


Just a little smaller, eh?
 

ClubSteeler

Member
Oct 16, 2008
416
11
18
Cool. You're looking at what I do for a living, except my satellite modems are not for radio.

I am currently designing the sigital down converter block. fun fun...
 
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limegrass69

Confused
Oct 12, 2008
6,079
245
63
New York
Looks like that will be a plug and play model. Makes for easy transition from home, to car, to office and back again.

Can I get Best of Sirius and a la carte on that??
 

Casual Fan

Surprisingly nice
Oct 14, 2008
19,024
3,053
163
Roanoke, VA
I had that model on my boat. You don't want to know what five minutes in a heavy salt water spray does to it. :confused:
 

Kryptonite

Well-Known Member
Oct 21, 2008
11,670
1,837
113
What does heavy salt water spray does to your unit? :idunno:

:scared:
:hhh:
:smug:
:rofl:
:right:
:jj:
:spit:


Some of the earliest Stern Show talk about satellite radio mentions the fact that the radios were as big as car batteries.