This year, for the first time, we present a free GNU Radio workshop as introductory session to the Software Defined Radio Academy 2017. The workshop will be held by Marcus Mueller and Bastian Bloessl DF1BBL, two regular contributors to GNU Radio.
It will take place on
> Friday July 14, 1600-1800h. Room "Schweiz", Messezentrum West, where we can host up to 50 people.
Prerequisites
We will be happy to help with our know-how, but we cannot provide a complete setup for everybody. So please make sure to bring at least your own laptop.
If you already own an SDR, you are more than welcome to use it. The minimum requirements for the workshop are quite relaxed. The SDR should be able to receive on the 70cm or the 2m band with a minimum bandwidth of 0.5MHz. Furthermore, it should be supported by either UHD or gr-osmosdr.
No SDR? No problem! Even if you don't own an SDR yet, you are welcome to join the workshop. We will bring at least 20 RTL-SDR dongles that we can lend you.
Ideally, you would have a recent version of GNU Radio pre-installed in your familiar environment. This is, however, not a requirement. We know that Linux has a steep learning curve and that GNU Radio built a reputation of being hard to install. We will, therefore, provide USB sticks with a live environment that will get you up and running instantly. You won't have to install anything. Just boot from the USB stick and you are good to go.
Program
After a brief overview of GNU Radio and an introduction to the basic concepts, we will immediately get our hands dirty. Step by step, we will build our own FM receiver. We will make heavy use of the graphical outputs to look at the signal at various stages of the decoding process. This helps us in understanding how a digital FM receiver is implemented and how it is realized in GNU Radio. (We assume that there will be more than enough transmitters to test our FM receiver on the 70cm and 2m band.)
Once we have a working FM receiver, we will go ahead and extend for digital modes. For this, we will make use of, so called, out-of-tree modules that extend GNU Radio with more specific functionality. (On www.cgran.org, you can find a comprehensive list of modules for all kinds of use-cases and technologies.) In our particular case, we will use an APRS decoder to demonstrate installation of the module and integration into our receiver.
Finally, like real hams, we don't just use existing functionality, but extend GNU Radio with our own blocks. With this, we will transition from GNU Radio users to GNU Radio developers. Don't worry, we won't focus on programming. (The actual "implementation" will be less than ten lines of code.) Instead, the goal is to make you familiar with the workflow that is required to extend GNU Radio with custom functionality.
So in summary, you will learn about:
- GNU Radio's core concepts
- building a simple FM receiver
- using out-of-tree modules for more specific functionality
- extending GNU Radio with our own custom blocks
Registration
While a formal registration is not required, we would appreciate if you could drop us an email if you are planning to join. Please also tell us if you need a rtl-sdr USB stick from us: Email: sdra@darc.de
Please make sure to bring your laptop and preferably a recent GNURadio installation on Linux so that you can follow the programming examples.