Hi Jeff,
I am familiar the the NI Communications System Design Pioneer Program. However, I'm uncertain about the characteristics of the tranceiver that you want to build. For instnace, are you planning on doing modulation and demodulation on the FPGA or in the Host? What type of modulation/demodulation are you doing? What is the expected bandwidth of your signals? Are you doing any pulse shaping filters? If you are doing digital demodulation, are you planning on writing a symbol clock recovery algorithm and a frequency correction algoritm? Do you have a particular protocol in mind? Do you want to the board to "respond' to a given message?
There are just a lot of things involved and it's trivial to implement a full transceiver in the FPGA, that's why I'm asking.
- Mauricio