Hardware Usrp

usrp

Ettus USRP — the research-grade SDR family, B200/B210 and older USB models

Vendor: Ettus Research / National Instruments

Status: supported — the identifiers and setup recipe are believed correct.

Not maintainer-verified: nobody on this project has run this hardware yet. The two facts are recorded separately on purpose (D-027) — a correct recipe and a tested device are different claims.

What it is

Ettus Research's Universal Software Radio Peripheral family. The B200 and B210 are the USB members and the ones most people meet; the entries here also cover the older USRP1 and B100, and the National-Instruments-branded B2xx boards, which enumerate under a different vendor id.

What you can do with it

Full-duplex transmit and receive with calibration and clock discipline good enough for research work, driven through UHD directly or through GNU Radio and SoapySDR.

Setup

Install uhd-host and join plugdev, then log out and back in. The FPGA images are large and Debian's package does not ship them all — uhd_images_downloader fetches what your board needs, over the network, on first use. uhd_find_devices should then list the board.

Known problems

The firmware download on first use surprises people, especially on a field machine with no connectivity — fetch the images before you leave. USB 3.0 is effectively required for the B210's full sample rate, and a marginal cable or hub shows up as dropped samples rather than as an error. The NI-branded boards are the same hardware under a different vendor id, which is why both appear above.

How it identifies itself

USB id	What	Confirmed	Node
fffe:0002	USRP1 device — unknown vendor	yes	libusb
2500:0002	B100 device — Ettus Research LLC	yes	libusb
2500:0020	B200 — USRP B210, Ettus Research LLC	yes	libusb
2500:0021	USRP B200-mini — Ettus Research LLC	yes	libusb
2500:0022	B200 — USRP B205-mini, Ettus Research LLC	yes	libusb
3923:7813	B200 device — National Instruments Corp.	yes	libusb
3923:7814	B200 device — National Instruments Corp.	yes	libusb

Access and permissions

Group membership required: plugdev — added at install, applies at next login.

Software that makes it useful

gqrx-sdr, uhd-host

Upstream: https://kb.ettus.com/