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GNU Radio

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41–50 of 71 posts

Re: GNU Radio

#41

Our satellite team in college used GNURadio to modulate and demodulate our radio signals, and to automate the entire pass (in conjunction with our mission operations team). I remember at that time (2016-2018), there was an absolute dearth of information on something as simple as demodulating GMSK, much less OQPSK. The given blocks for these modulation types never worked, so we had to build out custom blocks in C++ to…

I did my masters thesis with GNURadio 2013-2016 (a frequency-hopping implementation). I often thought my struggles were 100% my own incompetence, but eventually realized it was possibly 50% buggy GNURadio blocks. So much potential in SDRs but damn was this software an opaque mess to use.

Re: GNU Radio

#42

Could GNU Radio work as a Python alternative to NodeRED? (Node.js/JavaScript)

A more generic equivalent seems to be PyFlow: https://wonderworks-software.github.io/PyFlow/.

GNU Radio is targeted to a specific domain and the collection of existing nodes reflects that, similar tools exist for other domains, e.g. for CAD there is Sverchok which works with Blender: https://nortikin.github.io/sverchok/.

Re: GNU Radio

#43
post #13
post #2

Has always done a terrible job of selling itself. A $25 dtv receiver and a chickenwire antenna parabola and code your own satellite TV decoder, learn what radar guns emit, emulate a modem... maybe even shift to IR and do TV controls.. it's, latent in this stuff. But the frontpage doesn't take you there.

Is it possible to use a laptop's built-in wifi antenna / wifi card as the hardware side of a gnu radio setup? That seems like it would be a nice cheap one-two punch for getting started. AFAIR wifi uses the public (unregulated) bands so there should be lots of interesting stuff on those frequencies beyond wifi signals.

WiFi adapters don't really expose this type of interface. WiFi adapters interact with the host computer by sending and receiving packets, the 802.11 framing and radio de/modulation is performed internally by the adapter. In other words, the host computer sees IP packets, not radio data. Some adapters (or really most adapters) provide some ability for the host to send and receive raw 802.11 frames but it's an infrequently used feature and tends to have a lot of caveats and limitations... you'll see a lot of discussion of this if you read into security/exploitation use-cases for WiFi that involve monitoring or generating 802.11 management traffic.

This is somewhat related to the old difference between a "modem" and a "winmodem": proper telephone modems performed the de/modulation internally, winmodems did not and relied on the host processor to do so, resulting in generally lower performance but a much cheaper device. At modern network data rates it is not really feasible to do this and the general direction is towards offloading more and more of the work to the network adapter, outside of the host's control or view.

For gnuradio you need raw radio samples, often referred to as IQ data due to the nomenclature for amplitude and phase. Few devices that aren't specifically designed for software-defined radio use expose this data because it requires extra complexity in the device and tends to be rather high-bandwidth. The "RTL SDR" TV tuner dongles are so well known precisely because they contain an undocumented feature that allows a host to request raw IQ data, although at a poor sample rate and bandwidth since these devices were not really intended for it.

Re: GNU Radio

#44
post #2

Has always done a terrible job of selling itself. A $25 dtv receiver and a chickenwire antenna parabola and code your own satellite TV decoder, learn what radar guns emit, emulate a modem... maybe even shift to IR and do TV controls.. it's, latent in this stuff. But the frontpage doesn't take you there.

I am always shocked that radio isn’t core science curriculum in high school at this point.

Re: GNU Radio

#45
post #2

Has always done a terrible job of selling itself. A $25 dtv receiver and a chickenwire antenna parabola and code your own satellite TV decoder, learn what radar guns emit, emulate a modem... maybe even shift to IR and do TV controls.. it's, latent in this stuff. But the frontpage doesn't take you there.

Any chance this is at least partially deliberate? If more people were to use GNU Radio, the manufacturers of said hardware would get sued until they were forced to lock down their hardware.

Re: GNU Radio

#46
post #2

Has always done a terrible job of selling itself. A $25 dtv receiver and a chickenwire antenna parabola and code your own satellite TV decoder, learn what radar guns emit, emulate a modem... maybe even shift to IR and do TV controls.. it's, latent in this stuff. But the frontpage doesn't take you there.

Any chance this is at least partially deliberate? If more people were to use GNU Radio, the manufacturers of said hardware would get sued until they were forced to lock down their hardware.

Do you mean manufacturers of RTLSDR devices? Those don’t need to be locked down (in the US), as they are receive-only devices.

Re: GNU Radio

#47
post #2

Has always done a terrible job of selling itself. A $25 dtv receiver and a chickenwire antenna parabola and code your own satellite TV decoder, learn what radar guns emit, emulate a modem... maybe even shift to IR and do TV controls.. it's, latent in this stuff. But the frontpage doesn't take you there.

Not the github frontpage, no. But the actual homepage points you here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbBQHMnVMR41zZUZGF0bJ...

Re: GNU Radio

#49
post #2

Has always done a terrible job of selling itself. A $25 dtv receiver and a chickenwire antenna parabola and code your own satellite TV decoder, learn what radar guns emit, emulate a modem... maybe even shift to IR and do TV controls.. it's, latent in this stuff. But the frontpage doesn't take you there.

I am always shocked that radio isn’t core science curriculum in high school at this point.

100%

Re: GNU Radio

#50

Our satellite team in college used GNURadio to modulate and demodulate our radio signals, and to automate the entire pass (in conjunction with our mission operations team). I remember at that time (2016-2018), there was an absolute dearth of information on something as simple as demodulating GMSK, much less OQPSK. The given blocks for these modulation types never worked, so we had to build out custom blocks in C++ to…

I did my masters thesis with GNURadio 2013-2016 (a frequency-hopping implementation). I often thought my struggles were 100% my own incompetence, but eventually realized it was possibly 50% buggy GNURadio blocks. So much potential in SDRs but damn was this software an opaque mess to use.

There was a time where I could point to specific implementations in GNURadios source that were very buggy (lots of uninitialized memory assumed to be zeroed), but alas, it's been lost from my memory.
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