WInnForum Training Series

SDR Radio Waveform Development in the GNU Radio Environment 

Dates

Wednesdays, Oct. 15, 22, 29.  2:00-4:00 p.m. Eastern time

Overview

Software Defined Radio Solutions, LLC, doing business as SDRS, is offering an online introductory course in software defined radio through the Wireless Innovation Forum (WInnForum). SDRS will provide instructors, course materials, and technical support in use of the course materials. Participants will register and pay for the course through the WInnForum, which will provide webinar-hosting capability and technical support for aspects of course delivery that are not specifically related to technical content and software provided by SDRS.

Click here to learn about the presenters.

Learning Objectives

After taking this course, participants will be able to:

• Describe major factors that motivate development and adoption of software defined radio (SDR) and discuss basic SDR concepts
• Describe major SDR applications, enabling technologies, and design tradeoffs
• Develop a GNU Radio flowgraph (waveform) using the GNU Radio Companion (GRC) graphical tool and observe how the GRC flowgraph is implemented in the resulting Python code
• Develop a custom GNU Radio processing block
• Develop an SDR application that uses the liquid-dsp library

Student Engagement Model

During the course, students will be using GoToMeeting, which includes screen display, screen sharing, audio, and text chat features.  If running the software for the course in a virtual machine on a Windows or Apple computer, all these features will be available once GoToMeeting is installed.  Students who prefer to run the software from the Linux bootable image can run GoToMeeting on a separate computer, tablet, or phone..We will provide help on completing course assignments via individual emails, an email list, or an online forum established for participants.

Course Format, Duration, and Timing

The course will consist of six hours of online lectures, e.g., three weekly two-hour sessions over a 15-day period, with assignments between sessions.  Additional offerings of the course can be arranged if there is sufficient interest after the initial course.

Registration Fees

Course Content

Session #1 (two hours)

• Overview of course
• Motivation for software-defined radio (SDR)
• SDR definitions and concepts
• Commercial, military, and public safety applications
• Introduction to GNU Radio including background, architecture and operation
• Introduction to GNU Radio Companion (GRC), a graphical development environment for creating SDR flowgraphs (waveform applications)
• Demonstration of GNU Radio using RTL SDR radio frequency front end
• Tutorial #1: Develop a GNU Radio flowgraph, to be completed during class time by participants

Out-of-Class Assignment #1 (approximately two hours)

• Tutorial #2: A more complex flowgraph
• Tutorial #3: Creating an enhanced user interface in GRC

Session #2 (two hours)

• Overview of SDR enabling technologies including:
• Antennas
• radio frequency hardware
• analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog conversion
• digital signal processing
• digital hardware
• software engineering
• Tutorial #4: Develop a basic GNU Radio processing block

Out-of-Class Assignment #2 (approximately two hours)

• Tutorial #5: Develop a custom GNU Radio block that has user-configurable parameters, e.g., an amplifier block that models nonlinear operation

Session #3 (two hours)

• Review of operations required at the physical layer
• Overview of liquid-dsp, a C-language library of functions for physical layer signal processing
• Tutorial #6: Introduction to using liquid-dsp in SDR
• Demonstration of advanced SDR and cognitive radio applications