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:
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:
(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:
Just a little smaller, eh?
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:
(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:
Just a little smaller, eh?