As in previous years, we would like to present the latest state of our USRP family and the UHD and RFNoC software stacks. One focus of this presentation will be the USRP X440, our latest SDR product, which enables unprecedented instantaneous bandwidths. We will discuss how you can use our SDR product line to capture more spectrum than ever!
Optical Wireless Communications (OWC) is one of many new and growing interests of the research community; however, a significant amount of system-level OWC research has focused on theoretical and/or simulated analysis with limited experimental validation. In order to address this concern and support experimental OWC test systems, we have previously introduced the gr-owc out-of-tree module in...
This workshop provides a tutorial on the RFNoC framework, including a discussion on its design and capabilities, demonstrations of several practical examples, and a walk-through of implementing a user-defined RFNoC Block and integrating it into both UHD and GNU Radio. The RFNoC (RF Network-on-Chip) framework is the FPGA architecture used in USRP devices, specifically the E310, E312, E320,...
The Allen Telescope Array (ATA) is the world's only radio telescope built from the ground up to perform the search for technosignatures, signs of technologically-capable extraterrestrial civilizations. Hosted on the Hat Creek Radio Observatory, the ATA is comprised of 42 6.1m in diameter, offset Gregorian radio telescopes. Cryogenically-cooled dual-polarized log-periodic feeds are mounted on...
My research project is based on using modulated ultra sound at high frequency in the audio
band as a way to communicate between devices located in either Shipping Containers or Hi Rail
(Road Rail) vehicles. The research stems from a UTS capstone project completed ten years ago
that investigated methods to allow shipping containers that are stacked to form Ad Hoc
networks(Parr 2010).
The...
The Completely Hackable Amateur Radio Telescope (CHART) is a radio astronomy platform aimed at high school students and teachers. The project offers online tutorials and code for building an inexpensive instrument to detect the 21-cm signal from neutral hydrogen in the Milky Way. Complete parts for the project can be acquired for under $300. The base platform is intended to work out of the box...
The Completely Hackable Amateur Radio Telescope (CHART), is an initiative to create a radio telescope that is both low tech and low cost, making it easily accessible to anyone. The base design is optimized to look at the Milky Way and capture the hydrogen 21 cm line. The CHART project includes a base design that consists of a cardboard telescope and an RTL-SDR module programmed with GNURadio....
For the software defined radio (SDR) industry, when utilizing general purpose processors (GPPs), software-based waveform developers have leveraged Moore’s law to improve waveform performance by simply moving their code to better GPPs and SDRs as they become available. However, making full use of a computer’s capabilities today is a challenging task due to increased hardware and software...
Combining Software Defined Radios (SDRs) with the GNU Radio software development toolkit can enable rapid prototyping of integrated sensing and communications (ISACs) systems. In this paper, we conduct a Hardware-In-The-Loop (HWIL) over-the-air (OTA) experiment on a low-cost SDR platform testbed to demonstrate the feasibility of cooperative waveform design for a joint radar-communications...
Dr. Ralph J. Steinhagen, a senior scientist at FAIR (Facility for Anti-Proton and Ion Research), has worked in the fields of accelerator physics and technology for over 25 years. Drawing parallels between large-scale scientific research and team sports, he cherishes having "scored critical goals for the team", especially with his contributions to feedback control and high-frequency beam RF...
The Allen Telescope Array (ATA) is a radio interferometer currently composed of 42 antennas. The array is made up of 6.1-meter diameter offset Gregorian telescope elements distributed randomly with a maximum baseline of 300 meters. The recently upgraded cryo-cooled log-periodic antenna feed (known as Antonio Feed) is sensitive to a wide and continuous range of frequencies ranging from 900 MHz...
The srsRAN Project provides an open-source, ORAN-native, 5G CU/DU solution to simplify OpenRAN and 5G research, development, and testing.
srsRAN supports the use of 3rd-party UEs and 5G Cores (5GCs) to create end-to-end 5G networks with ease, with the option to fully customize the implementation. A great example of this is the ability to easily deploy a network and connect COTS UEs for...
Three-dimensional antenna arrays are a less-explored family of aperture distributions when compared to linear and planar topologies. This is due in part to performance degradation from shadowing and scattering when the array spacing is fixed and on the order of a half wavelength, but the overall logistical complexity of their construction also creates challenges that have limited their...
In this talk we will demonstrate how to build, control, and process data from a 10 GHz, 8 element, FMCW phased array radar. We will be using Analog Device's open source CN0566 (aka "the Phaser"), the ADALM-PLUTO, and GNU Radio Companion. There will be a live demonstration of beamforming fundamentals including: direction of arrival, monopulse tracking, tapering, grating lobes, and FMCW...
This course introduces and surveys beginner and intermediate-level signal processing focused on communications systems. The course will introduce basic math concepts fundamental to and applications of signal processing. The course will explore the properties of signals and systems, including spectral estimation, detection, and information theory.
The Signal Metadata Format (SigMF) specifies a way to describe sets of recorded digital signals with metadata written in JSON. It was designed for RF recordings, which consist of IQ samples. SigMF can be used to describe general information about the RF recording, the characteristics of the system that generated the samples, and features of the signal itself. This workshop, hosted by two of...
The AMD RFSoC (Radio Frequency System on Chip) architecture has gained significant attention within the Software Defined Radio (SDR) community for its integration of Radio Frequency (RF) frontend, FPGA fabric and Linux-capable Arm-based processing system. Despite its accessibility to researchers via the RFSoC2x2 and RFSoC4x2 development board platforms, its adoption within the GNU Radio...
Through the patronage of the DARPA DSSoC program, we constructed the DASH SoC, a coarse-scale heterogeneous SoC that breaks the trade-off in computational efficiency versus ease of reprogrammability. The DASH SoC caters to the target domains of sophisticated RF processing for communications, radar, PNT, and spectral situational awareness. We also developed an FPGA-based DASH emulation platform...
Radio telescopes are some of the largest instruments in use in astronomy, but their (angular) resolution is actually somewhat poor. This can be improved upon by combining several radio telescopes, in a technique called radio interferometry. This creates a much larger virtual radio telescope, with its size (and resolution) determined by the longest distance between participating telescopes. For...
A chance for women (and others!) attending GRCon to meet up. Very informal.
Much effort has been put towards what will become the official GR 4.0. In this brief overview, we discuss the various aspects of the prototypes and plans for the future.
The upcoming GNU Radio 4.0 release (GR4) will be the latest evolution of GNU Radio, signifying a marked advancement from GNU Radio 3 and a path to long-term, broad adoption of the framework. GR4's development prioritises streamlining the codebase by removing extraneous complexities inherited from its predecessor while preserving valuable functionalities. This approach enhances the software...
UPDATE: Download the large file:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/7qg5ek6g3pgruf1m1a0z6/sstate-cache.tar.gz?rlkey=jempcarxo0gctymrkw54pfzx8&dl=0
in order to be able to build packages during the workshop.
This workshop will cover aspects of using Embedded SDRs, including benefits and limitations. The workshop will begin with an overview of differences between Embedded SDR’s vs. Radio...
This year's talk will focus on the progress made in the development of CyberEther since last year's presentation. Software development has progressed significantly, and it's time for a new update. We will discuss the latest features and improvements, including brand-new DSP acceleration on Metal (inside Apple Silicon’s GPU) and support for Vulkan which makes it possible to use CyberEther on...
Timing synchronization plays a critical role in many high performance software defined radio applications. However, currently, to achieve the level of synchronization required to perform distributed open loop beamforming, cabled techniques such as precision PPS fanout buffers or White Rabbit must be used to align the system clocks to within a small fraction of a sample. However, we have...
TorchSig, a toolkit for applying deep-learning applications to wireless signals, was released last year and presented at GRCon. The toolkit has since undergone numerous changes to improve reliability and usability. This includes new examples for using deep-learning for tasks in spectrum awareness, new utilities for curating datasets, speedups in synthetic dataset generation and speedups in...
I will be presenting a method of receiving the NOAA weather fax system and viewing the transmission in real time using GNU Radio. This presentation will go over the process of creating a simple HF antenna, receiving HF on an RTL-SDR, how to decode APT (Automatic Picture Transmission) signals, and how to view faxes in real time. I will also touch on issues faced while creating this project, a...
Back by popular demand by those who could attend our first gathering and those who had conflicts.
A project was created with the following objectives:
- Send a file without repeating it.
- Use Packet formatting.
- Use BPSK modulation.
- Provide a means for the receiver to synchronize with the BPSK before the file is sent.
The talk will present the issues faced with meeting the objectives and describe how each piece was achieved. Simulated and live transmissions will be presented.
Hands-on session to work within the new framework to develop some usable blocks for GR 4.0 and learn the new paradigm
LightCube is a 1U Educational Cubesat which had the goal of connecting the public with space by producing a flash visible to the naked eye on command by a public user. The spacecraft could be triggered via HAM radio communications by those with an amateur license. LightCube is commanded with a DTMF sequence, and reports telemetry using RTTY, an AFSK modulation scheme. Telemetry is decoded with...
The RADAR equation states that the range resolution is inverse of the bandwidth. This generic time of flight assessment resolution under general conditions is greatly improved under the assumption of a single isolated target illuminated by a known noise sequence with a delay resolution improved by the signal to noise ratio brought by the correlation during the pulse compression.
Using...
Communication systems, by their nature, have a complex structure that contains multiple technologies. In order to teach communication systems, the steps that need to be taken in order for the signal to be transmitted to reach from the source to the destination are explained by prioritizing the block-based flow-graph. The given theoretical knowledge is consolidated by mostly using examples and...
The Array of Long Baseline Antennas for Taking Radio Observations from the Seventy-ninth parallel (ALBATROS) is a 21cm cosmology experiment that uses multiple autonomous antenna stations operating in the high Arctic of Canada to lay the groundwork for probing into the cosmic “dark ages” before star formation began. An overview of the ALBATROS project will be provided, along with a primer on...
Weber State University (WSU) has developed an ‘open-source’ antenna-pattern measurement system physically comprised of software-defined radios (SDRs), Arduino microcontroller and 3-D printed hardware. The student-designed measurement testbed was supported by the Utah NASA Space Grant Consortium. The ‘open-source’ prototype integrates Python, GNU Radio Companion, and Linux on a single laptop...
The authors present a web-based front end satellite tracking application for the automated tracking of two student-designed CubeSat satellites scheduled for launch in 2024 operating with a full duplex scheme in the UHF and commercial S-band frequency bands. Satellite signals are captured and processed by integrating GNU Radio with the Ettus Research USRP x300 SDR hardware. The USRP x300...
This paper implements an OFDM based system for joint communications and sensing. OFDM traditionally is used for passing modulated information bits in a multi-path channel. Prior to decoding the information bits, channel state information (CSI) is extracted from multiple sub-carriers in OFDM frames. The GNU based OFDM sensing performance is compared with our prior GNU based CW radar...
Acoustic communication through ice is a growing field of study with potential as both a data transfer and environmental characterization solution. Platforms for under-ice scientific investigation at Earth’s polar regions, like AUVs, ROVs, and glider surveys, are valuable tools for collecting ground-truth data; but in the GPS-denied under-ice environment, localization (positioning), and...
Pulse descriptor words (PDW) are measured properties of detected RF pulses. PDWs are often utilized for radar sensor characterization, identification, and emulation. Pulse measurements are typically provided as an option on high-SWaP, high-cost laboratory test equipment or as custom FPGA firmware which is not easily scalable to multiple SDR/RF platforms. gr-pdw is an out-of-tree (OOT) module...
Controlling stored beams in particle accelerator requires specially designed RF signals, such as needed for spill control via transverse excitation. The software-defined radio (SDR) technology is adopted as a low cost, yet highly flexible setup to generate such signals in the kHz to MHz regime. A feedback system is build using a combination of digital signal processing with GNU Radio and RF...
