Cyberspectrum Meetups are a casual forum to exchange knowledge and ideas related to Software Defined Radio and generally aim to get people excited about all the applications that can be realised with the technology. At each meetup, attendees have the opportunity to present their work/ideas to the group. Check out recordings from past Meetups here: Cyberspectrum.
Engineers, enthusiasts, hobbyists and people of all experience levels are welcome, no matter what your software/hardware background. Everyone is welcome to submit their ideas/presentations to the pool. There will be a show-and-tell section, several short presentations (e.g. an introduction to an SDR topic or analysis of a mystery signal), and a longer in-depth talk.
The Cyberspectrum Meetup will be Tuesday September 23rd from 7-9 PM at Festival Tower, Level 3, Station Road, Adelaide. You do not need a ticket for the GNU Radio Days event to attend the meetup and the event is free to join. We are collecting attendance information just to estimate the total number of people interested, you can sign up on the Registration page.
If you have a project or topic you would be willing to share, or have questions, please email dkozel@gnuradio.org.
Schedule
7:00 - 7:15 Meet and Greet
7:15 - 7:40 Introduction to GNU Radio
GNU Radio is a free and open source toolkit for building software defined radio applications. This introduction will teach the basics of using the click-and-drag graphical GNU Radio Companion, Python, or C++ to explore the wireless spectrum and build your own transmitters.
Derek Kozel is a long time GNU Radio contributor and project lead with almost two decades of SDR development experience.
7:40 - 8:00 Project Horus - Open Source Telemetry for High Altitude Ballooning
What goes up... must transmit signals back down! Mark Jessop will take you through the telemetry systems developed by Project Horus to reliably track their high-altitude balloon flights, and even transmit high resolution imagery from 40km altitude. These systems are all open-source, and now include web-browser-based receivers for greater accessibility.
Mark Jessop is a RF engineer working in defence. As a hobby he launches high-altitude balloons with the Amateur Radio Experimenters Group flying all sorts of interesting radio payloads, and also helps run the SondeHub high-altitude balloon tracking ecosystem.
8:00 - 8:20 What is IQ and why is it used?
Telecommunications is all about manipulating amplitude, phase and frequency to get your message from A to B. So building a bridge of understanding on how to do this with a pair of complex signals and blocks of discrete data is quite a leap for introductory users of SDR.
8:20 - 8:40 LoRa and Meshtastic, What's under the hood?
This talk will explore how LoRa’s physical layer actually transmits information, using GNU Radio’s gr-lora_sdr and interactive Jupyter Notebooks to decode and visualize real signals from the Meshtastic network. We’ll step through what makes LoRa’s chirp modulation distinctive, how data is packed into each transmission, and what can be learned by looking “under the hood” at the raw waveforms. No programming or DSP expertise required—just curiosity about what’s really flying through the air.
8:40 - 9:30 Show and Tell Social
