Conference, RF, SDR

GRCon20 Virtual Conference Day 1

GnuRadio Conference has gone virtual! Due to COVID-19 almost every conference is going virtual which gives many people the ability to attend that did not have the ability to before. While I miss being there in-person I believe this will have a huge benefit to the community in the long run, allowing new people to join, get excited about SDR and contribute amazing ideas and projects. Here is a link to my previous GRCon adventure back in 2018.

Schedule

Full Conference Schedule 9/14 – 9/18

Full Live Video Day 1

Thanks to Mark in the comments for adding the time markers for each talk!

Cool Talks Day 1

Welcome and Project UpdateBen Hillbern

Just listening to Ben talk about the project gets you fired up to do more cool things with GnuRadio. He talks through project updates for version 3.8 and what things for 4.0 could look like. Such as replacing core GnuRadio Runtime in 4.0 version to support heterogeneous processing topologies. Probably a long time away but projects like OpenCPI could help.

Big news GnuRadio partnering with SETI Institute!

Highlighted projects from the community

gr-satellites an GnuRadio Out Of Tree (OOT) module encompassing a collection of telemetry decoders that supports many different Amateur satellites.

gr-marmote3 Team MarmotE modem for the DARPA Spectrum Collaboration Challenge 2 (SC2). Basically everything except the AI algorithm ie the secret sauce…

sparrow-wifi was built from the ground up to be the next generation 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz Wifi spectral awareness tool, utilizing python3. It has the ability to integrate dedicated wifi module scanning with SDRs such as the HackRF and GPS sensors.

openwifi while not using GnuRadio for its processing the openwifi project has made an astounding amount of progress in creating an open source wifi access point using commercially available development boards from Xilinx and ADI.

Video Decoding AdventureOona Räisänen

This talk plays like a story, where the main protagonist dives deep into the world of radio signals, hunting them down to learn more about them using DSP techniques and SDRs. The signal turns out to be a spurious emission from an HDMI display. She then goes on to decode the signal using custom software similar to TempestSDR or gr-tempest. This DSP process was also used to record and display PAL off the NES console onto her MacBook. Cool!

Capturing PAL Video with SDR

https://github.com/windytan

Seeing SignalsRichard Stanley

This lightning talk looks to visually display the location of a transmitter using a 2D heat map and several receiving antennas in order to determine the position in angle and azimuth. Its a work in progress but really neat!

Screen Capture of his set up from the video

seeing signals GitHub project

Workshop: Decoding Interplanetary SpacecraftDaniel Estévez

I was not able to attend the workshop but the contents of the workshop were graciously posted on GitHub! Check it out below.

Workshop: Decoding Interplanetary Spacecraft

The slides are very comprehensive overview of the processing used to analyze and decode the signals.

Radio Resilience CompetitionSid Sijbrandij, Marc Newlin, Matt Knight

Inspired by the DARPA Spectrum Challenge and the DARPA Spectrum Collaboration Challenge they created the new Radio Resilience Competition. This competiton aims to build algorithms that can be reliable even in the face of intentional interference for use in the unlicensed part of the RF Spectrum. The key objective beaing, improve the state of the art for resilient radio links.

They created a software test environment that allows competitors to get up and running quickly based around Docker and Docker-compose. I was able to get mine running on my lunch break!

The scoring is fairly simple, all you need to do is receive the longest set of continuous packets starting from 1 to n. If your receiver incorrectly receives packet number 5 your score is 4 even if your receiver receives packets 6-100 correctly. More information can be found on the competition website

https://radioresilience.com

The simulator can be cloned from their GitHub repo, although you will need to install Docker and Docker-Compose for your system to run it along with gnuradio and a few useful OOT modules to help you design your algorithms.

https://gitlab.com/radio-resilience/simulator

From the video it sounds like the competition will take place on the weekend of October 3rd 2020, so you better get cracking!

3 thoughts on “GRCon20 Virtual Conference Day 1”

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