Thank you to Aaron for submitting news about his latest project called "DragonOS" which he's been working on while in COVID-19 lock down. DragonOS is a Debian Linux based operating system which comes with many open source software defined radio programs pre-installed. It supports SDRs like the RTL-SDR, HackRF and LimeSDR.
Aaron's video below shows how to set up DragonOS in a VirtualBox, and he has two other videos on his channel showing how to set up ADS-B reception with Kismet, and how to run GR-RDS in GNURadio. He aims to continue with more tutorial videos that make use of the software installed on DragonOS in the near future.
At the Hackaday Supercon Michael Ossmann & Kate Temkin presented a talk called "Software-Defined Everything" where they demonstrated some applications of the "GreatFET One" interface board. Michael Ossmann is best known for creating the HackRF software defined radio which is a highly versatile and low cost open hardware/software SDR transceiver. His company Great Scott Gadgets also employs Kate Temkin who is the lead software developer who worked on their latest product called the GreatFET One.
The GreatFET One is a multi-purpose digital interface board that plugs into a PC via USB. It contains multiple digital IO pins, supports SPI, I2C, UART and JTAG serial protocols, can do logic analysis, and also has a built in ADC and DAC.
In the talk Michael and Kate show how a simple light sensor can be plugged into the GreatFET's ADC, allowing the sensor's data to be digitized and processed in GNU Radio. This results in a software defined light sensor. By analyzing the light data in the frequency domain via an FFT graph they're able to determine the refresh rate of the ceiling lights.
Later they also show how GreatFET can be combined with i2C sensors and GNU Radio to do creative things like use an accelerometer as a microphone for a guitar pickup, with audio effects like guitar clipping controlled by GNU Radio blocks.
Michael Ossmann & Kate Temkin - Software-Defined Everything
One CTF that Clayton set up was a frequency hopping challenge with several levels of difficulty. The signal consisted of a narrow band FM signal that constantly hopped between multiple fixed frequencies. The idea was to use whatever means possible to piece together that signal again so that the speech audio could be copied.
The first level had the audio signal hopping very slowly, so the speech could be pieced together manually by listening by ear to each channel it transmitted on. Subsequent levels had the signal hopping much faster, so they required some DSP work to piece everything back together.
In his post Clayton writes about three possible GNU Radio based DSP solutions to the problem. The first method he describes is an interesting method that abuses the effects of aliasing. Aliasing is a problem in SDRs when a signal can be folded on top of another, creating interference. However, this approach makes use of aliasing to purposely fold the hopping channels into one frequency, resulting in speech that can be copied.
The rest of his post explains two other methods that could be used as well. The second method involves treating the entire band consisting of the hopping signals as a single FM signal, then filtering it with a DC block. The third approach uses FFT to detect which channel is active with the highest power, then shifting that channel by it's offset.
Spectrum of the frequency hopping CTF challenge.
Clayton also set up another CTF with gr-paint. The idea was to read text on a "painted" waterfall with ever decreasing text spacing that would eventually be too small to read on standard SDR programs like GQRX. Instead, the solution was to open the IQ data in a tool like Inspectrum or Baudline which has much higher FFT resolution.
Over on Twitter and YouTube Bastian Bloessl (@bastibl) have been posting teaser shots and videos of GNU Radio 3.8 running on an un-rooted Android device. Unfortunately there doesn't yet seem to be any word yet on how he's been able to do this, but we guess that the details will all be released in due time, possibly on his blog.
GNU Radio is an open source digital signal processing (DSP) toolkit which is often used in cutting edge radio applications and research, and to implement decoders, demodulators and various other SDR algorithms.
GNU Radio 3.8 on un-rooted Android. Now with double-mapped circular buffers using Android shared memory. USRP B2XX support. Volk support including a Volk Profile Android app (thanks @albinstigo for the NEON kernels) and OpenCL acceleration w/ gr-clenabled (thanks @Ghostop141). pic.twitter.com/w2tdaRW4Mk
GNU Radio Conference 2019 (GRCon19) was a conference about GNU Radio and projects based on GNU Radio that was held back in September 2019. GNU Radio is an open source digital signal processing (DSP) toolkit which is often used in cutting edge radio applications and research, and to implement decoders, demodulators and various other SDR algorithms.
Yesterday videos from all the GRCon19 talks were uploaded to YouTube. The talks consists of many high level and cutting edge SDR topics. All talks can be found on their GRCon19 YouTube playlist, and matching slides on the GRCon19 website presentations page.
A list of the talk titles is pasted below.
Huntsville's Connection to Space
GNU Radio Project Update
Mega Hertz, Mega Samples, Mega bits, Mega Confusing
Man or Machine?: Developing a Turing Test for Radio Intelligence
UHD Four-O
Striving for SDR Performance Portability in the Era of Heterogeneous SoCs
Fixing the E310 Bottleneck: Implementing a High-Rate Heterogeneous FPGA DMA
Determining Optimized Radio settings for specific waveforms
Software Defined Everything
GNU Radio Beyond 3.8 - A Technical Outlook
GNU Radio Enhancements for Space-Based Research
A decade of gr-specest -- Free Spectral Estimation!
Open Source Licensing
Spectrum Monitoring Network: Tradeoffs, Results, and Future Directions
The Future of Digital RFICs
Phase Synchronization Techniques
Synchronization: Core Concepts and Applications
AI and SDR: Software Meets Hardware Again...
Building a radio with M2K and spare parts
How we talked from the Moon: the Apollo communication system
gr-satellites: a collection of decoders for Amateur satellites
gr-iio: Nuances, Hidden Features, and New Stuff
Open Sourcing the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
Multi-Vehicle Map Fusion Using GNU Radio
SigMF.
GPUDirect + SDR: How to Move One Billion Samples per Second over PCIe
Multichannel phase coherent transceiver system with GNU Radio interface
GNU radio is a popular environment for teachers and developers involved in Digital Signal Processing and exploring new radio architectures. For receiver applications, the low cost dongle is a popular hardware choice, but if you need reliable, clean, continuous radio signal reception from 1kHz to 2 GHz (without the need for block converters or external filters) then an SDRplay RSP is a useful alternative.
With help from the GNU radio foundation, SDRplay has now made available a workflow for windows for all its RSP radios: www.sdrplay.com/docs/gr-sdrplay-workflow.pdf
Special thanks goes to Frank Werner-Krippendorf (HB9FXQ) who did the original SDRplay source block development, and to Geof Nieboer who has developed the Powershell scripts which enable operation on Windows.
Ben Hilburn is the project lead for GNU Radio, the free and open software radio ecosystem.
GNU Radio works best in an Linux environment and can also run on the ever popular Raspberry PI.
Ben and I discuss what GNU Radio is, how people are using GNU Radio, and how easy it is to get started with this amazing piece of free software.
If you are looking to learn how the hardware inside of a radio makes it work, or maybe you already do…. GNU radio is a great resource for you
Ben himself has a new podcast of his own titled "Signals & Bits" and there are a number of episodes already out, including an interview with SignalsEverywhere YouTube channel host Harold Giddings, Manuel Uhm Director of Marketing at Xilinx who talks about SDR designs on FPGA chips, and most recently Daina Bouquin who talks about her project called "The Space Library" that is in collaboration with the LibreSpace Foundation.
GNU Radio Days 2019 was a workshop held back in June. Within the last week recordings of the talks have been uploaded to YouTube by the Software Defined Radio Academy channel. The talks cover a wide range of cutting edge SDR research topics and projects. Many of the presenters have also made use of RTL-SDR dongles, as well as other higher end SDRs in their research.
All the talks are combined into two 3 hour long videos from the morning and day sessions from day one. Day two also has two videos that consist of recordings from the tutorial sessions which make use of the PlutoSDR. Finally there is also the keynote speech from Marcus Müller where he dives into the internal workings of GNU Radio.
Below we list the talks with timestamps for the YouTube video. Short text abstracts for each of the talks can also be found in the conference book. We note that not all the abstracts appear to have been presented in the videos, so it may be worth checking out the book for missed talks about passive radar, a 60 GHz link, embedded GNU Radio on a PlutoSDR, an SDR 802.11 infrared transmission system, PHY-MAC layer prototyping in dense IoT networks and hacking the DSMx Drone RC protocol.
