Assembling the USRP

The Universal Software Radio Peripheral, or USRP (pronounced “usurp”) is designed to allow general purpose computers to function as high bandwidth software radios. In essence, it serves as a digital baseband and IF section of a radio communication system. In addition, it has a well-defined electrical and mechanical interface to RF front-ends (daughterboards) which can translate between that IF or baseband and the RF bands of interest. The basic design philosophy behind the USRP has been to do all of the waveform-specific processing, like modulation and demodulation, on the host CPU. All of the high-speed general purpose operations like digital up- and down-conversion, decimation and interpolation are done on the FPGA.

-Ettus Research

To assemble the USRP, start with this page on Cornell university where it begins with the USRP in box and talks about how to assemble it with the BasicRX/BasicTX daughterboards.

Then Continue to this picture set from flickr where some one shows the finished product.

When assembling be careful of static electricity that you generate – it could potentially destroy the boards. Consider using anti static mats to prevent such situations. Also remember to only plug in or unplug daughterboards when the power is off. If you forget this, you’ll blow the tiny on-board fuse and the board will stop working.

The USRP motherboard is capable of handling anything from DC to 2.9 GHz, but you need
the matching daughterboards for specific ranges. Daughterboards [ettus.com] include:

• BasicRX, 0.1-300 MHz receive
• BasicTX, 0.1-200 MHz transmit
• LFRX, DC-30 MHz receive
• LFTX, DC-30 MHz transmit
• TVRX, 50-860 MHz receive
• DBSRX, 800-2400 MHz receive
• RFX400, 400-500 MHz Transceiver
• RFX900, 800-1000 MHz Transceiver
• RFX1200, 1150-1400 MHz Transceiver
• RFX1800, 1500-2100 MHz Transceiver
• RFX2400, 2250-2900 MHz Transceiver

Also, you obviously need to have the matching antenna to actually receive something useful in
a given frequency range.

-source

For more information on the daughterboards read through these two pdfs which have a list of TX and RX daughterboards and Transceiver daughterboards along with their features. Furthermore check out the USRP Documentation on gnuradio.org which focuses mainly on the internal hardware structure of the USRP.

Finally as an example, using a telescopic antenna attached via a BNC to SMA converter hooked up to the USRP, you can listen to FM radio or watch analog TV.