SDR WiFi Beacon transmit and receive length

My current setup is a SDR (software defined radio) Adalm Pluto device is connected to a Windows computer with Matlab. I have the toolboxes installed and I am able to connect successfully vis USB and configure the SDRs. I am having success transmiting and receiving WiFi Beacons with my SDR. I do notice through testing that using the captureWaveform( sdrReceiver, rx_samples) function takes over a second to run, but I am only attempting to capture 1/10 of a second of data with my function. Why does it take this long? If I have this running in a loop, I have to assume that I am missing a lot of the beacons I am transmitting. Is there a way to adjust this so to not miss sent Beacons or at least miss less of them in receive? does sdr.SamplesPerFrame impact this?

Answer 1

[praguna manvi]

Hi @Michael Burke,

I understand that you are trying to capture data using the ADALM-PLUTO Radio, I couldn’t find “captureWaveForm”; as per the documentation, you can use the “capture” function. The “capture” function, as mentioned in an example establishes a connection to the hardware to obtain RF signals from an SDR device; hence, we can expect a delay.

Here is a link to an example:

• https://www.mathworks.com/help/comm/plutoradio/ug/capture-rf-data-to-baseband-file-using-adalm-pluto-radio.html

To ensure no samples are missed, you can enable “EnableOversizeCapture,” which does not guarantee data contiguity and does not limit to a sample size. You can find more information on the parameters of the “capture” function in this documentation:

• https://www.mathworks.com/help/comm/plutoradio/ref/plutoradio.sdrrxpluto.capture.html

Hope this helps!

[Michael Burke]

Thanks. the issue I have is that I need to do a little bit of processing between signal captures. The "EnableOversizeCapture" does not allow for that from what I understand. After doing some experimenting I think receiving at 20 Msamples/s and my processing is too much for the ADALM-PLUTO Radio to keep up with. Using the Receiver below 8 Msamples/s seems to work fine with no overflow errors. However, WiFi Beacons need to be captured at least with 20 Msamples/s to properly recover the beacons which is what I need for my application. So I think I am stuck with gaps in receiving a steady stream of my tranmitted beacons. If there is a fancier solution other than using a different SDR, I am all ears. Thanks