Thank you to Matt Knight for submitting news about the Radio Resilience Competition which is all about finding ways to building the best wireless PHY layer via SDR. Anyone around the world can participate from the comfort of their own home, as the competition is run entirely via a GNU Radio RF simulator system. Matt writes:

The Radio Resilience Competition is a community-focused Software Defined Radio competition that is all about building the most interference-resistant, highest-performance waveforms possible.  Inspired by DARPA's Spectrum Challenges, it goes back to basics by focusing on the foundational layer of all wireless communications -- the PHY.  Registration is open now on our homepage!

For your readers, IMO the most exciting dimension of the Radio Resilience Competition is that it takes place entirely on virtual infrastructure.  We decided to design the competition this way to set the lowest possible barrier to entry, and to draw the biggest competitor pool possible.  DARPA's challenges relied on big expensive RF emulators built on real radios and supercomputers which, despite being immensely cool, capped the total number of competitors and had some material drawbacks.  Furthermore, we open sourced our RF simulator so competitors can run it locally and rapidly iterate on their designs.  We hope the simulator will have uses beyond the competition as well.

The Radio Resilience Competition is organized by Sytse Sijbrandij, who in an entirely separate capacity from running this competition is also the CEO of GitLab.  Sid envisioned the competition after learning about unlicensed spectrum and becoming an SDR hobbyist himself.

We presented the Radio Resilience Competition at GNU Radio Conference on Monday.  Here's a link to our talk if you are interested -- it goes into more detail about the conception of the competition, as well as the infrastructure we built for it.