GRCon20 Virtual Conference Day 2

The Virtual GRCon continues! The conference is in full swing, more and more people are becoming active in the conference chat and there has been a flurry of activity in the Capture The Flag Competition (CTF). The reason I went to my first GRCon was to learn from the hands-on workshops and to better understand the community around the code as well as to network with people in industry and academia using the software. Unfortunately I was not able to sign up for the workshops this year (They sell out fast), but there is still a ton of information to be gained by listening to the talks in the moment. I think I did so many workshops I barely made it to like 2 talks a day and had to watch the rest months later, by that time fewer people will be available to answer your questions, so strike while the iron is hot over on the various chat channels!

GnuRadio Chat

Schedule

Full Conference Schedule 9/14 – 9/18

Full Live Video Day 2

Cool Talks Day 2

Architecture Update – Marcus Mueller

GnuRadio 3.7 will now be set as legacy, 3.8 as Stable, and 3.9 is the work in progress version. 3.9 changes include no python2, VOLK is separated out as a true dependency, and SWIG is being replaced by PyBind11. gr-iio should also be upstreamed in 3.9 (fingers crossed)

What does moving to 4.0 look like? Well it mostly revolves around updating the runtime which is used to execute processing blocks. The idea is to expand it for Modular cpu runtime, support heterogeneous architectures, and distributed DSP.

Don’t break all the blocks! The comprehensive library of implemented DSP blocks is a main asset of the GnuRadio software. Therefore moving forward there needs to be a way to test new runtime designs in a sandbox like environment where new ideas can be tested without the constraints of the legacy system. Check out the progress on the GnuRadio newsched repo

Gnu Radio and Seti At The Allen Telescope Array – Ellie White

The goal of the summer project was to implement GnuRadio control and data acquisition systems for the ATA and to provide a friendly user interface to the GnuRadio community as well as educators, students, and scientists. The experimental USRP system used the N320 and N321 devices with 4 antennas for 1 polarization or 2 antennas per polarization data acquisition. The GnuRadio OOT modules that were created during the course of the project can be found below.

gr-ata OOT modules

Esa’s Ops-Sat Mission: Powered By Gnu Radio – Tom Mladenov

This is Esa’s first 3U cubsat that is open, which means that it is dedicated to executing software and hardware experiments in LEO. The UHF receiver link ,used to communicate with the cubsat, was created using GnuRadio flow graphs and built around the cubsat space protocol. They created a reference implementation that forms the receiving ground station. They also built a GUI application as well.

gr-opssat

More Information on the OPS-SAT operation can be found here

I also found the ops-sat on the SatNOGS database so you can take a look to see if it is overhead!

SatNOGS OPS-SAT

Designing A Narrowband Radar Using Gnu Radio and Software Defined Radio For Tomography and Indoor Sensing – Victor Cai

This presentation is evident that technology is not only moving faster but is also extending to include students earlier and earlier in their academic careers. Here Victor, an High school student produces a technology presentation and demo that could only have been done in a university lab a few years back. He uses the GnuRadio software along with a few Lime SDR Minis to create a high accuracy and low cost in a narrowband radar. This was done by using the MFCW radar algorithm and some coffee can antennas (always a radar classic)!

Check out his presentation slides and the accompanying paper submission! Congrats this is an awesome achievement.

Presentation and Paper

What’s Your Angle? Practical Considerations When Developing Phase Coherent RF Platforms with Sidekiq X4 – Bobby Smith, Epiq Solutions

These two GIFs explain the difference between phased locked and phase coherence

As you can see the phased locked does not maintain its position relevant to sig1 after each tuning away event but stays locked once it is steady. The phase coherent signal on the other hand is always in the same relative position to sig1 after every using event.

This plays a big part in beam forming, adaptive arrays, direction finding, as well as MIMO and 5G technologies. All of which relay on knowing the phase difference between adjacent channels in order to manipulate them.

He then goes on to show the performance of the EPIQ Solutions Sidekiq x4 Radio in the coherence calibration.

EPIQ Solutions

GNU Radio in a Direct-RF World – Dr. Travis Collins

There are several common types of radio front end architectures including the Superheterodyne, Zero IF, and the Direct RF architectures. Each have their own advantages but the talk dives down into the Direct RF structure, where a very high speed DAC or ADC is basically connected to an antenna. He goes into the good and the bad of the architecture but the main limitation becomes just the massive amount of data that needs to be processed.

Thanks to Travis for helping to maintain the awesome gr-iio modules and for vigilantly answer question on the ADI EngineerZone website!

GRCon Capture The Flag (CTF)

Today I spent way too much time on the CTF, but its a lot of fun! Its kind of like an easter egg hunt but you have to use GNURadio as well as your DSP knowledge to find all the flags! Register and have a go at GRCon-ctf