R820T2 breakout board

R820T2 Downconverter Breakout

This is a breakout board for the Rafael Microelectronics R820T2 Advanced Digital TV Silicon Tuner chip. This is the same chip used in most all of the RTL-SDR dongles, as well as the Airspy and numerous other radios.

The chip is a versatile front-end with reasonable sensitivity and wide tuning range. The design presented here is almost an exact implementation of the Mfg’s suggested demo design from the datasheet, implemented on the OSHpark 4-layer PCB process and provides a simple 4-pin interface with power, ground and I2C bus for controlling the tuner. A broad-band RF input and 10MHz IF output are provided on SMA connectors.

Features:

R820T2 tuner chip
Onboard 3.3V Regulator (5V input).
Full Mfg’s suggested support circuitry.
Optional crystal or TCXO LO reference frequency.
50-ohm SMA input and output

Firmware

I’ve provided a simplified driver based on work from Airspy and the Linux media drivers which allows control of the R820T2 from an STM32F0xx processor.