Building A $50 SDR With 20 MHz Bandwidth

Anders Nielsen is building a modular SDR called PhaseLatch targeting $50 USD with nearly 20 MHz bandwidth, far exceeding the RTL-SDR's ~3.2 MHz limit. The design uses a 20-bit, 10-bit ADC paired with a Cypress FX2LP microcontroller for USB 2.0 data streaming. A key challenge was the analog bandwidth bottleneck in the PhaseLoom front-end board (~650 kHz), which was partially resolved by reducing amplifier gain. The FX2LP's large buffers and parallel interface make it well-suited for streaming SDR data to a PC, and further improvements await an updated PhaseLoom board.