GNU Radio 2.8 review

GNU Radio is a collection of software that when combined with minimal hardware, allows the construction of radios where the actual wa

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 1004K Developer: Free Software Foundation, Inc.

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GNU Radio is a collection of software that when combined with minimal hardware, allows the construction of radios where the actual waveforms transmitted and received are defined by software. What this means is that it turns the digital modulation schemes used in today's high performance wireless devices into software problems.

What is a Software Defined Radio?

Joe Mitola says, "A software radio is a radio whose channel modulation waveforms are defined in software. That is, waveforms are generated as sampled digital signals, converted from digital to analog via a wideband DAC and then possibly upconverted from IF to RF. The receiver, similarly, employs a wideband Analog to Digital Converter (ADC) that captures all of the channels of the software radio node. The receiver then extracts, downconverts and demodulates the channel waveform using software on a general purpose processor."

For our purposes, on the receive side, the idea is to get a wide band ADC as close to the antenna as is convenient, get the samples into something we can program, and then grind on them in software.

What's New in This Release:
GNU Radio 2.6 includes sending and receiving data at up to 1Mbit/sec using GMSK. There's also support for the new USRP Flex 400 transceiver daughterboards.
Handling of all daughterboards has been unified, so most apps will work without modification on any of them. For those of you interested in wireless networking, see especially gnuradio-examples/python/gmsk2. We've got a framework in place to allow you to build and experiment with your own MACs. 2.6 includes the "null MAC". A carrier sense MAC is the next logical step.