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Your First GNU Radio Receiver With SDRPlay

November 12, 2015 by 25 Comments

Although GRC (the GNU Radio Companion) uses the word radio, it is really a graphical tool for building DSP applications. In the last post, I showed you how you could experiment with it just by using a sound card (or even less). However, who can resist the lure of building an actual radio by dragging blocks around on a computer screen?

For this post and the accompanying video, I used an SDRPlay. This little black box has an antenna jack on one end and a USB port on the other. You can ask it to give you data about a certain area of the RF spectrum and it will send complex (IQ) data out in a form that GRC (or other DSP tools) can process.

The SDRPlay is a great deal (about $150) but if you don’t want to invest in one there are other options. Some are about the same price (like the HackRF or AirSpy) and have different features. However, you can also use cheap TV dongles, with some limitations. The repurposed dongles are not as sensitive and won’t work at lower frequencies without some external help. On the other hand, they are dirt cheap, so you can overlook a few little wrinkles. You just can’t expect the performance you’ll get out of a more expensive SDR box. Some people add amplifiers and converters to overcome these problems, but at some point it would be more cost effective to just spring for a more expensive converter.

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Getting Started With GNU Radio

November 11, 2015 by 25 Comments

Software Defined Radio (SDR)–the ability to process radio signals using software instead of electronics–is undeniably fascinating. However, there is a big gap from being able to use off-the-shelf SDR software and writing your own. After all, SDRs require lots of digital signal processing (DSP) at high speeds.

Not many people could build a modern PC from scratch, but nearly anyone can get a motherboard, some I/O cards, a power supply, and a case and put together a custom system. That’s the idea behind GNU Radio and SDR. GNU Radio provides a wealth of Python functions that you can use to create sophisticated SDR application (or, indeed, any DSP application).

If Python is still not up your alley (or even if it is), there’s an even easier way to use GNU Radio: The GNU Radio Companion (GRC). This is a mostly graphical approach, allowing you to thread together modules graphically and build simple GUIs to control you new radio.

Even though you usually think of GRC as being about radios, it is actually a good framework for building any kind of DSP application, and that’s what I’ll show you in the video below. GRC has a signal generator block and interfaces to your sound card. It even has the ability to read and write data to the file system, so you can use it to do many DSP applications or simulations with no additional hardware.

UPDATE: Don’t miss the follow-up post that uses SDRPlay to build a GNU Radio based receiver.

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