Pluto Temperature, SDRConnect Files (Updated December 19th, 2024)

Simon Brown • December 19, 2024

Pluto Temperatures

October 7th, 2024

Manfred (DC2MH) contacted me recently with a question about the Pluto FPGA temperature display.

Using scripts from Analog Devices the display is 20°C higher, so there's possibly an error in SDR Console. It only took a few minutes to find the problem - during early Pluto support I had added a fixed 20°C to reduce the displayed FPGA temperature to a value similar to the tuner.

Future kits will now show a correct value for the Pluto FPGA temperature as per the screenshot.

Update, October 14th 2024

Siegfried Jackstien (DG9BFC) reports that when starting Pluto the FPGA temperature is shown as 20°C higher than the tuner, even with a massive heatsink connected. This is obviously incorrect as on switch-on the temperature of both chips should be roughly room temperature.

As a result the fixed 20°C reduction has been restored.

Update, December 19th 2024

See this github post. "First of all the temperature readings are die temperatures. Even if you have a high thermal conductivity cooling solutions, the temperatures will never be the same."

So this explains the difference - the fact that these are die temperatures.

PDF with Github post.

SDRConnect IQ Files

October 7th, 2024: Currently adding support for the new SDRConnect IQ file format which is RF64 but implementing header fields and file chunks in a manner which is totally legal but confused SDR Connect.

The WAVE RF64 specification is here.

As an aside, an easy way to check that a WAV file is structurally correct is to simply display the properties as per the screenshot. If you see a value for both Length and Bit rate then it's OK.

Many thanks to Bjarne Mjelde in Arctic Norway for his help.

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