I’m a gyrocopter pilot, a hybrid between a ”normal” airplane and a helicopter.
We send radio on the AM band and can trigger the landning lights by sending a carrier signal for 30 seconds.
What I would like to do is to listen for a specific pattern in the signal, pretty much like morse code. So if I push the send button like T-T-T-P-T-T-T-P-T-T-T where T = trigger send and P = pause.
Looks like a good thing to use the FPGA for, I need to constantly monitor the radio with as low latency as possible.
But where do I start, what externa components do I need and what area of defining modules should I look extra at to make this a real winner project?
I haven’t done much with radio, but you’ll need something that will receive the signal and turn it into a digital signal the FPGA can read. If I understand what’s going on, it would be similar to UART where you wait around for the first pulse then check if the signal level at a given interval after that. Looking at the uart_rx module would be a good starting point I think.
I have a bunch of RTL-SDR modules but they are USB-A at the moment so I have to dismantle them to make them fit or do something with my Br board. They can listen up to 6GhZ radio so they should be ok to use, also they can only receive so no problem with accidental transmission on the air bands etc.
Not sure how I can decode AM signals but that’s a later problem.