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GNU Radio - The GNU Software Defined RadioCopyright © 2001 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
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Current Release Versions Alpha Release GNU Radio 0.3 26 February 2002 Core files Alpha Release MC4020 0.5 26 February 2002 Optional PCI-DAS4020/12 driver Introduction
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 Mitoloa 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." [1]
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.
Can you give me an example?
To get a better idea of what we're talking about, please see the screen shots and examples. They range from playing a sine wave out a speaker, a single channel FM receiver, a display of the real time Fourier transform of the signals from a high speed analog to digital converter, to an application that receives two broadcast FM stations at the same time from the same input.Availability
The latest official alpha release is available for testing from http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/opensdr/gnuradio-0.3.tar.gz
In addition, the optional driver for the Measurement Computing PCI-DAS4020/12 20 million sample/sec analog to digital card is available from http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/opensdr/mc4020-0.5.tar.gz
Anonymous CVS
For those who prefer their software on the bleeding edge, the latest GNU Radio development sources are available via anonymous CVS.
Use the following commands to check them out (just hit return when you are prompted for the password):
$ cvs -z3 -d :pserver:anoncvs@subversions.gnu.org:/cvsroot/gnuradio login Password: $ cvs -z3 -d :pserver:anoncvs@subversions.gnu.org:/cvsroot/gnuradio co -P gnuradioBe sure to use the -P option on your check out. This prunes empty directories from the build tree.
Once you have the tree checked out, you can keep it up to date by using cvs update.
You can browse the cvs archive live from the savannah repository with the help of viewCVS.
If you want to mirror the entire GNU Radio cvs repository, we provide an anonymous rsync server at rsync://subversions.gnu.org/cvs/. Please contact cvs-hackers@gnu.org if you do publicly mirror the repository, so that we can list your name here.
Before using the CVS version of GNU Radio, you ought to have installed recent versions of GNU Autoconf and Automake, then run ./reconf in the newly-created gnuradio directory in order to regenerate the configure script and Makefile.in files.
Resources
Online Documentation
You can read about various features that we hope to include in future versions of GNU Radio.
Mailing Lists
GNU Radio has three mailing lists hosted at gnu.org. Archives of the discussion list are stored at http://mail.gnu.org/pipermail/discuss-gnuradio/:
- discuss-gnuradio@gnu.org is for discussion of GNU Radio development, porting to new platforms, ideas for the future, general GNU Radio usage or problems. New alpha and stable releases are announced here. You can subscribe or unsubscribe on the web with mailman, or by sending an email to discuss-gnuradio-request@gnu.org with subscribe as the subject line. Volume is typically low.
- patch-gnuradio@gnu.org is where the patches to the gnuradio repository are posted for peer review before being commited to CVS.
- bug-gnuradio@gnu.org is for reporting bugs, and to enable the developers to track submitted bug reports. If you think you have found a bug in gnuradio, please send as complete a report as possible to this list. If we can't reproduce it, we can't fix it. Ideally, you should include the text you get by running config.guess, the text you see when you run configure, and if you can, a patch made with diff -u5 which fixes the problem.
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$Date: 2002/02/27 01:45:56 $