Speaker
Description
Whether to stay informed about local events or for entertainment purposes, public safety communications monitoring gives the general public an inside view of first responders and governmental agencies responding to emergent situations in their communities. Historically, this monitoring has been enabled by specialized receivers, known colloquially as "scanners" or "police scanners", which implement behaviors and functions specific to the nature of public safety radio traffic. The scanner cycles through pre-programmed frequencies of interest, stopping and unmuting the audio only when communications are taking place. Other scanners are capable of following and decoding digital communications on more modern, sophisticated public safety trunked radio systems.
Commercially available scanners are shipped with stock behaviors that are designed to serve the broadest possible audience and typically do not allow for granular customization to meet an individual user's particular needs. As an avid public safety communications monitoring hobbyist for 35 years, I have found myself wishing for a commercially available scanner that allows users to implement custom behaviors and abilities. Fortunately, software-defined radio and GNU Radio provide an entrypoint to build just such things!
In this talk, I will detail the architecture of a public safety-oriented trunked radio monitoring system based around the NI/Ettus USRP E310 software-defined radio which leverages GNU Radio and the RFNoC (RF Network-on-a-Chip) architecture to implement a front end that is capable of supporting a number of communication types. GNU Radio Python bindings and interprocess message passing allow behaviors to be implemented independently of and isolated from the front end flowgraph, while RFNoC enables signal processing duties to be handled by the FPGA fabric on the USRP E310 that would otherwise need to be performed by its modest processor. Furthermore, the rich ecosystem of available Python modules enables the creation of flexible and interactive user experiences through which listeners can easily and intuitively tailor the communications they wish to monitor.
| Talk Length | 30 Minutes |
|---|---|
| Acknowledge | Acknowledge In-Person |
