I got to see this in person at pacificon a few weeks ago. Also the creator is my friend from UIUC who I consider a brilliant rf/DSP engineer.
The demo was able to show and end to end tx chain from gnuradio to a receiver.
Really excited to see this! As there are a myriad of other things that this hardware can be used for as well.
We’re starting with the “Quad” tile — a 4 Tx × 4 Rx SDR designed for arraying — and expect to ship the first units toward the end of this year. They're actually quite capable as a standalone SDR. A Quad can interface directly with a Raspberry Pi 5, and we’ve built a combined enclosure for the SDR + Pi setup. You can run SDR software locally on the Pi or stream IQ samples over gigabit Ethernet to a remote PC.
Software support includes GNU Radio, Pothos SDR, and just about any tool compatible with SoapySDR. We’re also doing some fun demos, like visualizing Wi-Fi signal sources in real time ("Wi-Fi camera") and performing mm-scale 3D localization—a prerequisite for the automatic array calibration.
Larger arrays are assembled by simply tiling these Quads into an aluminum/PCB lattice framework, enabling anything from compact 4-antenna MIMO nodes up to 240-element lunar-bounce arrays. The goal is to have full phased-array capability by March 2026.
The broader vision behind open.space
is to make advanced RF and space-communications hardware open and accessible—so anyone can experiment with technologies once limited to national labs: moon-bounce (EME) links, satellite reception, terrestrial RF imaging.
Happy to answer questions here.
One thing I'm excited about getting working is mobile moon bounce!
Great question, the latest version has Tx RHCP, and then Rx either LHCP or RHCP controlled with RF switches (in each antenna). This allows point to point links (where the Tx pol and Rx pol should be the same), or "bounce links" where the circular polarization flips with the bounce. I should note RHCP Rx has a bit worse noise figure (LNA is different) but good enough for any line of sight.
There are ten 640 MSPS ADCs (I+Q per channel and a cal path, per 4-antenna PCB tile). These are custom MASH ΣΔ designs built from discrete diff pair transistors (cost about $0.08 each) and do noise shaping/decimation to get a clean 50 MHz of baseband bandwidth. The 8x DACs are also ΣΔ, using the LVDS pins of the FPGA and some modulating DSP. Mixers are MAX2850/1, LNA are custom design based on Infineon transistor, and RFPA is a Skyworks part meant for WiFi (have iterated on a few model numbers).
The demo was able to show and end to end tx chain from gnuradio to a receiver. Really excited to see this! As there are a myriad of other things that this hardware can be used for as well.