O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference 2003
Eric Blossom, Blossom Research
Matt Ettus, GNU Radio
GNU Radio talk
2003-04-23

Notes by Dan Moniz <dnm@pobox.com>


What's GNU Radio?
	- Free software toolkit for:
		- Building and deploying software radios
		- Learning about DSP and communication systems
		- Creating new kinds of radios, modulations, protocols, development
			environments
		- Regulatory hacking
		- Exploring!

What's Software Radio?
	- Get the software close to the antenna
	- Turn H/W problems into S/W problems
	- Code defines the waveforms transmitted
	- Code demodulates the waveforms received

What can I do with it?
	- Convential radio stuff
	- Spectrum monitoring
	- Multi channel
	- Multi mode
	- Morph on the fly
	- Better spectrum utilization
	- Cognitive radio

What kind of H/W do I need?
	- Narrow band
		- Sound blaster
		- Narrow band RF front end (NFM, USB/LSB, AM, ...)
		- Audio output from receiver (packet, PSK31, ...)
	- Wide band
		- High speed A/D (20M+ samples/sec)
		- Wide band RF front end (e.g., TV tuner)

FM Radio Demo
	- adc3_fft on FM 5Mhz
	- Standard broadcast FM radio demodulation
	- Live radio through software
	- Vanu (sp?) is working with StrongArm/XScale handheld size devices
	- GNU Radio code is in C++, Python and Scheme bindings coming soon
	- Lots of floating point with SSE2 and MMX optimized code.
	- Displays being updated at the refresh rate
	- 20 megasamples/sec, not skipping -- this is saturating the PCI bus
	- Demo is running on a dual 1.5 GHz Athlon, but with single-proc compiled
		code.
	- FPGA-based kit will be open and confirmed to work with GNU Radio.

HDTV Receiver Demo
	- 6 MHz wide band
	- 18 MB/sec output
	- MPEG-2 out
	- Law & Order demodulated
	- Several times real time, but pretty effing good.
	- Some motion artifacts due to xine as the viewer
	- 1920 x 1088 down to 1024 x 768 due to projector

Politics
	- MPAA/CPTWG/BPDG "Broadcast Flag"
	- FCC: Software radio in general
	- FCC: Free software radio