It’s that time of year again! the GNURadio Conference is back, in-person and virtual as a hybrid conference this year!
This conference is centered around the GNURadio software and its different aspects and community. Focusing on software-defined radio processing and its applications. Each year the conference is held at a different location in the US, this year in Charlotte NC, but is also available online, streaming the main presentation stage to youtube.
Info
I compiled a couple of links to help you get information on the conference but the most up-to-date info can be found on the website.
Matrix Chat
Come join us on the conference chat using the Matrix environment, GNURadio has detailed how to sign up with very helpful screenshots!
Monday Day 1
I selected a few presentations that I thought looked interesting take a look below.
NASCAR Joe Gibbs Racing Team: Keynote
Presenter: Mark Bringle
In this keynote, the GNURadio software might not be front and center but provides a fun introduction to NASCAR racing history and a comprehensive overview of the type of information that is needed to be successful in racing. This requires tons of information to be sent not only to the pit crew but back to a war room where complex calculations can be done to be analyzed and sent back as instructions and strategy. This involves each crew member having radios to convey data and or voice communications in order to manage the whole race.
Capture The Signal Intro
Presenter: Federico Maggi, Marco Balduzzi
Capture the Signal builds on a more traditional capture the flag event by providing the ability to live stream IQ data to participants over IP. This way participants do not need any hardware but can interact with the signals just like a hardware device in GNURadio. This also makes it possible to run events when transmitting over the air is not legal.
Host your own CTS based on their system Github:CaptureTheSignal
A Newbie’s Guide to the GNU Radio Universe
Presenter: Barry Duggan (GNU Radio)
Getting started with GNURadio is not for the faint of heart, but now there are some wonderful guides, tutorials, and documentation that should help you through your journey to mastering GNURadio. Newbie Guide to GNURadio
A GNU Radio SETI Pipeline for the Allen Telescope Array
Presenter: Michelle Yiwei Chai
SETI processes tons of data in order to search for techno-signatures, which is processed by an application called turboSETI. But to get the information from the Telescope array to the processing backend this project uses GNURadio. This allows more robust processing and makes the data more accessible to other researchers as well. The pipeline takes samples from a USRP through polyphase filter banks, FFTs, and then a data shaping matrix which can be sent over to turboSETI, all while not writing the intermediate data to disk!
Reverse Engineering Smart Meters
Presenter: Hash Salehi
Ever wonder how the electric company knows how much to charge on your bill? Back in the day, a technician would need to come out and read the dial on your meter, but not now, all this is done with the internet of things! Smart meters contain way more than you would think from relays to complex mesh networking modems but are they secure? Most companies use proprietary protocols with little documentation but security through obscurity is not the way to go. In this talk Hash walks through his journey reverse engineering hardware and even the wireless protocols with the help of gnuradio!
Radio Resilience, LLC: Radio Resilience Competition at GRCon!
Presenter: Matt Knight, Marc Newlin, Sid Sijbrandij
With their experience competing in several other spectrum challenges, they set out to create their own radio challenge that sidestepped the long iteration cycles and expensive hardware. It’s called the Radio Resilience Challenge and you can compete right here at the conference! All you need to do is clone the repo off Gitlab and get started. More info is down in the CTS section.
Simple Diversity and MIMOTechniques in GNU Radio
Presenter: Matt Ettus
MIMO technology underpins many of the recent improvements in increasing our wireless throughput. You most likely use it every day when you connect to your WiFi hotspot at home, but what is it and why are there very few people using it in the context of GNURadio? This presentation gives a pretty comprehensive overview of MIMO technology and shows examples using GNURadio flowgraphs to understand the processing involved.
Tuesday Day 2
Open Source FPGA Tooling: Keynote
Presenter: Claire Wolf (YosysHQ), Gatecat (YosysHQ), Matt Venn (YosysHQ), Sylvain “tnt” Munaut
FPGAs are critical devices in the SDR space providing flexible logic for signal processing but more importantly as an interface layer between high-speed ADCs and DACs. FPGAs from the big two Xilinx and Intel (Altera) use complex and cumbersome toolchains that can bring powerful servers to their knees on complex designs. These toolchains contain proprietary algorithms used to convert HDL to bitstreams that can be loaded into hardware, but can we build an open-source option? The talented team at YosysHQ is doing just that! The keynote goes into how we came to this point and a small demo that generate a Risc-V processor on real hardware.
Epiq Solutions: Detecting 5G Cells
Presenter: Aaron Madsen
5G is all around us now, but how do we go about detecting cells. This talk goes into how you would go about this and shows various solutions from Epiq, but I would just listen in for the memes!
Channel Leakage Cancellation for Software Defined Radio (SDR) Narrowband Radar Interferometry Using GNU Radio
Presenter: Victor Cai (Analog Devices)
Building off of last year’s project, the presenters detail how they overcome leakage (unintended signal from one antenna to another) using cancellation techniques in GNURado.
Adventures in RFNoC: Lessons Learned From Developing a Real-Time Spectrum Sensing Block
Presenter: Rylee Mattingly
Taking a deep dive into the RFNoC architecture provided by higher-end Ettus USRP SDRs this presentation goes through how they developed a GNURadio block and FPGA gateware to do real-time spectrum sensing.
A New Experimental Setup for Collecting nRF2.4 and LoRa Devices Signatures for Machine Learning based Device Authentication
Presenter: Zheng Zeng (Penn State Behrend), William Hemminger (Penn State Behrend), Abdallah Abdallah (Penn State Erie – The Behrend College)
Device fingerprinting is the process of finding a unique, non-forgeable property that can be used to identify that device. This can be used in authentication or to weed out malicious attackers. The idea is to characterize a transmitter based on its IQ transmission based on its unique RF impairments that are due to minute manufacturing differences.
Multi-Receiver Real-time Physical Intrusion Detection “Burglar Alarm” with GNU Radio and USRP N310
Presenter: Daren Swasey (Utah State University Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering)
Taking advantage of the parameters a receiver uses to extract a signal from a noisy environment this project tries to determine if there is motion occurring in a space for a burglar alarm application. This is due to the fact that the transmission channel with change from Tx to Rx is based on the physical impairments in the environment. For example, a human moving in between the line of sight path, for instance, would temporarily degrade the signal which would be detected in the receiver’s attempt to equalize the new channel.
Interior Target Tracking Using Digital Communications Signals for Bistatic Radar with Gnu Radio
Presenter: Todd K. Moon (Utah State University)
Building on top of the idea that “if you can detect motion can you localize it?” from the burglar alarm presentation, this presentation goes into the methods that you could use to localize that movement.
Wednesday Day 3
Spectrum Sharing: Keynote
Presenter: John Chapin
Building Spectrum sharing systems is hard but the current state of spectrum licensing cannot continue in perpetuity. Devices are smart now, they have processing capabilities no one would believe when the wireless spectrum was getting divide up. So we need to start taking advantage of all the unused spectrum that is just sitting there when an incumbent is not actively utilizing it.
SigMF v1.0.0 Update
Presenter: Ben Hilburn, Jacob Gilbert
SigMF is now officially in version 1.0.0! The signal metadata format is a cool project that looks to standardize the metadata you need when analyzing an IQ capture from an SDR. We have all had that frustration when we need to process an old IQ file but cannot remember the sampling rate? what frequency we were looking at? etc so this should help resolve these issues in the future and become an integral part of the GNURadio project.
Deepwave Digital: Artificial Intelligence Radio Transceiver with on-board GPU
Presenter: Jeff Zurita (Deepwave Digital)
What happens when you combine traditional SDR hardware with an onboard GPU? well you get the AIR-T from DeepWave Digital! This architecture is mainly intended to be used for developing AI Radio applications but with the developments of GPU signal processing the ideas are limitless.
Deep space reception by AMSAT-DL
Presenter: Daniel Estévez
For nearly one year, the German amateur satellite association AMSAT-DL has regularly been decoding the telemetry of the Chinese Mars probe Tianwen-1 using the 20m antenna at Bochum observatory and GNU Radio. This has allowed us to obtain updated orbital information from the spacecraft and receive the relayed signals during the landing of the Zhurong rover. To our best knowledge, this is a record of using GNU Radio for receiving digital communications at a distance greater than 300 million km.
Rampart Communications: Cryptographic Modulation: Zero-Attack-Surface Wireless
Presenter: Dr. Matt Robinson, Mr. Keith P
Physical layer security is the application of cryptographic techniques to the physical layer of radio hardware. This is security directly built into the IQ sent over a broadcast channel. So Bob can hear the message but Eve (eavesdropper) cannot even demodulate to bits! This was a company talk that showed some cool concepts but the exact details on how this modulation mapping works were not explained.
WISCANet – SDR Networks using GNURadio and Python
Presenter: Jacob Holtom (Arizona State University)
SDR Network that can be used with GNURadio Python and Matlab to test and develop distributed systems, demonstrate coms and radar applications. Each node synchronizes based on GPS and processes the over-the-air data in chunks without real-time constraint. The use case is to accelerate the time proving out a more mathematical representation of an algorithm, show it works, then spend the time to develop a real application once an algorithm is proved out experimentally. This also allows the researcher to compare algorithm implementations from Matlab or Python, or even RFNoC blocks on an FPGA!
Thursday Day 4
Stay Tuned!
The Square Kilometre Array: Keynote
Presenter: Anna Scaife
The Square Kilometre Array will be the world’s largest radio observatory. The project looks to answer fundamental questions about our universe such as when did the first stars and galaxies form? Where do magnetic fields come from? and search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Two telescopes will be built, a centimeter wave array and a meter wave array. These need low RF interference so they selected South Africa (protected astronomy array) for the centimeter array and West Australia for the meter wave array (extremely low population per sqr KM).
the centimeter array will include an array of 197 dishes spread across South Africa. The first 64 form the meerkat telescope and have already been built. The second telescope (meter wave) consists of islands of dipole antennas, 130,000 of them!
Where does GNURadio fit in? Radio interferometers take the combination of each pair of dishes or antennas by correlating them, give a measure of power on an angular scale. dishes closer together give larger angular scale and ones farther away give narrow scale.
To generate images (such as the one above) we need to process the data and it’s a ton of data 600PB/year! They also need to send it all over the world so dedicated submarine fiber is being laid with regional centers all over the world for high-performance computing so that researchers can utilize this massive project.
LLLama and the Lake Monster: SDR in Neutral Atom Quantum Computing
Presenter: Dr. Robin Coxe (Atom Computing Inc.)
This talk provides an overview of unique, wired SDR applications for Atom Computing Inc.’s quantum computer. They employ lasers, magnets, and cameras to cool, trap, manipulate, and read out an array of qubits constructed from optically trapped neutral atoms. The physical processes that underpin neutral atom quantum computing would not be possible without precise, closed-loop control of the amplitudes, frequencies, and phases of electromagnetic (optical) fields.
This control is mediated through the acousto-optical and electro-optical effects, whereby RF signals couple to optical fields in a highly controllable manner. These RF signals are generated by Hapyxelor, our subsystem named after a mythical Canadian lake monster, that outputs an array of arbitrary RF waveforms from ~50 MHz to 16 GHz by means of a custom RFSoC-based SDR in a MicroTCA chassis.
Analog Devices: Implementing OFDM Radar & DOA on DirectRF Platforms using IIO and GNURadio
Presenter: Robin Getz (Analog Devices)
This project details the intricacies and challenges of using gr-iio, the Analog Devices out of tree module for interacting with SDRs like the Pluto-SDR, to build OFDM Radar and Direction of arrival modules that were packaged into a new out of tree module called gr-ofdmradar!
gr-tempest: Spying Video Interfaces Through Electromagnetic Emanations
Presenter: Federico Larroca (Facultad de Ingeniería, Universidad de la República)
A TEMPEST attack or Van Eck Phreaking is technology straight out of a spy movie. An attack consists in receiving a signal given off by a digital monitor and inferring the image being displayed on it. This idea is interesting in the context of SDR since it requires custom processing not seen in most communications devices.
This presentation shows off gr-tempest an out of tree module for GNURadio that is intended to emulate and extend another Open source software (TempestSDR) that performs a similar function but does not allow researchers to play with the internal or intermediate signals as we can do in GNURadio flowgraphs. This covers the basic mathematical principles all the way to some real-world examples!
Capture The Signal (CTS or CTF)
There are two events to participate in this year, a traditional capture the flag (signal) similar to the ones that have been run in previous years and new to this year a dedicated Radio Resilience Competition just for the event.
I competed in the CTS last year and had a ton of fun trying to decode signals. you don’t need any radio hardware you just get an IQ or SigMF file and can use any tools (but hopefully GNURadio) to find the hidden key or message in the signal. Each one builds on the other so try to complete as many as you can!
Last year I also competed in the first Radio Resilience Competition that was presented at GRCon20. In this competition, you have to build a resilient radio that can reliably deliver packets across a noisy channel and you get a score based on the number of packets you transmit till your first dropped packet. I will be competing at the conference but you can check out my previous experience below.
Previous Confence Years
I attended the conference for a few years when I have had time, check out my coverage of previous events below.
