It is now over twenty years since the first USRPs were shipped to SDR hackers around the globe, and the development of SDRs has not stopped. As proud sponsors of the GNU Radio conference, we therefore use this opportunity to present on current SDR activities at NI and give an update on what SDR power-users can expect in the near future.
This work presents a practical framework for sustaining robust mmWave communication links in non-line-of-sight (NLoS) scenarios using a dynamically reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) operating at 28 GHz. The system integrates GNU Radio with a Python-based control backend to coordinate signal processing, RIS steering, and beam selection in real time. The focus of this work is on the...
ExpressLRS is an open-source high refresh radio control link that has proven resilient to interference while maintaining a maximum achievable range at that rate with low latency. Designed to be the best FPV Racing link, it is based on the Semtech SX127x/SX1280 LoRa hardware combined with an Espressif or STM32 processor. We build the first known open-source implementation of ExpressLRS in GNU...
We designed and tested a drone with a wide-band transmitter (down to 30 MHz up to to 1.8 GHz) to measure the complex antenna pattern of radio telescopes. We basically split a VNA in half and flew one half on a drone. Radio telescopes at sub GHz frequencies are often not mechanically steerable. They are composed of arrays of dipoles, troughs, or dishes "pointing up". This makes it challenging...
EME, often known as Earth-Moon-Earth is a way of communicating between two earth stations by using the Moon as a passive reflector. This presentation will show in detail how to design and build an SDR based radio with low noise amplifiers, power amplifiers and antenna systems to successfully communicate using the Moon as a reflector. Details will be presented on the RF and analog design,...
As wireless communication standards evolve, techniques such as wideband, multi-channel transmission, and high-order modulation are conducted to support higher data rates and throughput. For example, IEEE 802.11ax employs 1024-QAM with up to 160 MHz bandwidth, while IEEE 802.11be extends support to 4096-QAM and 320 MHz bandwidth. In cellular networks, 3GPP 5G NR supports bandwidths up to...
Connected robotic systems perform many complex tasks through coordination, such as cooperative search of an environment, consensus, rendezvous, and formation control. At their core, these systems rely on local coordination between intelligent agents making reliable, low-latency, high-rate wireless communication of primary importance. Beyond simply maintaining connectivity, reliable...
How does oscillator phase noise degrade Error Vector Magnitude (EVM) in 5G NR waveforms? This talk presents a step-by-step methodology to predict that impact—starting from a modeled phase noise spectrum and ending with EVM performance metrics for a 5G NR OFDM signal.
We show how to calculate the expected EVM from vibration-induced phase noise using known system parameters, and validate...
A widely studied configuration within Cell-Free massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (CF mMIMO) networks is the centralized architecture, where all Access Points (APs) are connected to a Central Processing Unit (CPU) that performs Linear Minimum Mean Square Error (LMMSE)-based uplink signal estimation. As an alternative, sequential uplink signal processing refines users' signal...
This work presents a novel hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation framework for testing and evaluation of digital signal processing routines for active radar systems by leveraging the open-source PYNQ (Python Productivity for Adaptive Computing Platforms) framework. This test and evaluation approach offers several advantages, including increased accessibility, reduced development time, and...
Securing wireless communication against eavesdropping is critical, particularly in dynamic and decentralized environments. We present gr-PHYSEC, a new GNU Radio out-of-tree (OOT) module for real-time physical-layer key generation. Unlike traditional key generation that relies on pre-shared secrets or computational complexity, our approach derives symmetric keys from the wireless channel’s...
This project investigates the use of Software Defined Radio (SDR) for Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) to detect shallowly buried objects, and evaluates its performance against a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) GPR system. It marks the first engineering collaboration between Weber State University and the 309th Software Engineering Group (SWEG) at Hill Air Force Base (HAFB).
Traditional GPR...
Precise synchronization of time, frequency, and phase is crucial for coherent processing in distributed radar systems, especially at higher frequencies where timing errors rapidly degrade performance. To enable distributed radar operations such as coherent transmit beamforming, distributed radar systems must achieve time synchronization on the order of tens of picoseconds, requiring...
OFDM transmit and receive blocks have long been available to users, developers, and researchers within the GNU Radio ecosystem [1]. These tools are actively maintained by the community, including many domain experts. In previous work, I collaborated with Mr. Barry Duggan to develop an out-of-tree (OOT) block that implements preamble and postamble support for BFSK modulation. This feature...
WiFi device fingerprinting and re-identification (RFFI) are critical functions for wireless security, mobility intelligence, and many other applications. However, rapid prototyping and evaluation of fingerprint extractors remains a challenging task. Model performance evaluation requires exploring various environmental conditions, emitter types, and more.
To streamline this process, we...
GNU Radio uses FFTW for it FFT computations. In many cases, FFTW has excellent performance. However, newer libraries are emerging that in some important cases have better performance. Additionally, the Rust language is becoming more popular due to its built in safety guarantees.
When porting some FFT intensive GNU Radio blocks to an ARM based system, significant performance degradation...
Multi-Channel RF Systems using wide bandwidth signals are common in many applications. Keeping all channels - even distributed ones - well synchronized is a common ask from these types of systems. In reality, RF and baseband synchronization are not perfect though - but how accurate do they need to be for a given application?
Is 1 ps plenty? Is it not enough? Will 10 degree phase offset work...
Previous attempts to integrate FPGA acceleration into GNU Radio have primarily focused on front-end processing. This abstract proposes a novel approach: extending FPGA acceleration to a block-centric model using non-SDR PCIe FPGAs, with an emphasis on SWAP-C (Size, Weight, Power, and Cost). The goal of this talk is to demonstrate a proof-of-concept for an FPGA-accelerated GNU Radio block....
Large Language Models (LLMs), built on transformer-based deep learning architectures, are increasingly being explored as high-level controllers. With standards like the Model Context Protocol (MCP), LLMs can now orchestrate and interface with external software, including radio stacks such as GNU Radio. Our initial investigation focused on using LLMs to dynamically manage signal processing...
One of the hardest problems of high-bandwidth software-defined radio systems is also one of the most basic: Data movement. In this talk, we shall explore some low-level methods of streaming data over Ethernet, including raw sockets, RDMA, and io_uring. We will discuss how we can best use these technologies in GNU Radio and SDR systems, as well as provide some benchmark results on throughput,...
This paper and talk investigate the application of real-time scheduling techniques and analysis to the GNU Radio scheduler. Real-time scheduling theory allows for analytical bounds to be derived for end-to-end signal-processing response times. However, the current scheduling infrastructure in GNU Radio is designed using heuristics aimed at improving observed or average performance, not...
This talk introduces a GNU Radio Out-of-Tree (OOT) module that implements several blind source separation (BSS) algorithms, including Independent Component Analysis (ICA), Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF), and Adaptive Event Processing. The module integrates with GNU Radio’s flowgraph architecture, facilitating real-time signal processing within...
Software Defined Radio (SDR) has played a transformative role in democratizing access to radio-based systems by reducing the reliance on proprietary hardware and software. In this work, we present two practical implementations of SDR systems for acquiring imagery and data from GOES satellites, highlighting its relevance to both educational contexts and institutional applications.
First, we...
TorchSig is software for radio frequency (RF) machine learning (ML) that generates signals and performs model training for signal detection and modulation recognition. The software is also packaged with the gr-spectrumdetect GNU Radio block which runs an ML model for detection and modulation recognition. The talk and paper discuss the latest advancements in the software: the ability to train...
Abstract-- Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communications, particularly those based on the IEEE 802.11p amendment for the 5.9 GHz DSRC band (5.850–5.925 GHz), are fundamental for enhancing road safety through time-sensitive message exchange. However, deploying such systems can be hindered by the cost or band limitations of existing RF hardware. This paper presents a preliminary implementation...
