[Hackrf-dev] Building a HackRF

[Chuck McManis]

I applaud your effort!

Some things to note however, the HackRF design is a bit 'old' in the terms
of chips it uses. Some have already have end-of-life notices (which often
has the general meaning that production has stopped of new parts). AFAICT
all of the parts are still available but they are getting scarcer. That
said, if you're just building a 2 or 3 boards you can often request a
manufacturer to sample you up to 10 pieces for this sort of
prototype/exploratory work. They will ask questions like "when do you
expect to go into production" and "what sort of run rate will you be
requiring (units per month/year))" I typically answer those questions with
"this is exploratory work to test component compatibility for our design
target, in the event that we decide to go to production with this design it
would be several thousands of units a year." All of those statements are
true but the probability of that particular future might be quite low. I
got there after talking with a field representative for Analog devices who
was anxious to give me parts to play with but he had to "check the box"
with respect to sizing the opportunity. He suggested much of the wording as
something he could pass along and check the box, but would not be construed
as an obligation by his management to call this a design "win". So when
they came back later and said "What did that FizzBuzz Electronics product
turn into?" He could say "They've gone a different way" and not catch any
flack for giving me samples (which the FAEs know getting out into builders
hands creates word of mouth buzz) from a corporate bean counter that might
want to compare sample numbers to unit sales. Generally its in the noise so
hard to draw any specific conclusions.

Building SDRs is a fairly nichey but lucrative target for these guys so
they want to keep themselves in front of the engineers who are actually
building hardware.

--Chuck


On Thu, Mar 1, 2018 at 7:39 AM, Munson, Jonathan (Jon) (MAJ) <
jvmunson at nps.edu> wrote:

> Ladies and Gentlemen,
> I am planning to build one or two HackRF Ones based on the BOM and stuff
> already provided at github.
>
> My initial survey of DigiKey, Mouser and Newark/Farnell yielded some
> requirements not yet met. One chip basically requires a min 2500 order, and
> several I need to request quotes (which I've done, simply waiting on that).
>
> I would appreciate any guidance and pointers from anyone who has recently
> acquired the parts and assembled a HackRF. Especially helpful also would be
> an updated BOM or even equivalent parts lists that are known to work.
>
> Respectfully,
>
> Jon
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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>
>
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