Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] testing FLEX modems with gnuradio

[Ron Economos]

I've tried pager_rx.py on bladeRF, and it works fine
here (GnuRadio 3.7.2.1 and Ubuntu 13.04). Tons of
traffic on channel 25 here in Silicon Valley.

I've made some changes to the code to work better
with bladeRF (mostly with the gain setting).

http://www.w6rz.net/pager_rx.py

When a flow grays out and you have to force a
quit, it usually means you don't have enough CPU cycles.
However, at 1.2 Msps, pager_rx.py isn't really taking
much CPU. Perhaps it's your VM?

Ron

On 2/13/2014 3:31 PM, Al Smith wrote:

I am new to gnuradio and have spent the last few days reading every tutorial I can find.  I have set up both 3.7.1 and 3.6.5 in separate test environments in 2 VMs.  I am using a BladeRF SDR with dual 900MHz antenna.

I've been asked to test 2 devices which will controlled remotely over the FLEX paging network. I can see some blocks have been built into gnuradio-companion, FLEX Deinterleave and FLEX Synchronizer.  I also found some samples here https://github.com/argilo/sdr-examples but I think these were built for a different version of gnuradio possibly.  When I run the python script pager_rx.py or pager_rx_929.py it pops up with a nice waterfall display and I even get some text decoded signals in the terminal window, but within a few seconds the display goes gray and I cannot change any of the sliders and must force quit to get out.  I loaded the multi_tx.grc in gnuradio-companion just to get an idea of how to build a flow chart for FLEX, but I get some errors about missing blocks.

Loading: "/home/test/sandbox/gnuradio-builds/sdr-examples/multi_tx.grc"

>>> Error: Block key "iqbalance_fix_cc" not found in Platform - grc(GNU Radio Companion)

>>> Error: Connection between blocks_add_xx_0(0) and iqbalance_fix_cc_0(0) could not be made.

sink block id "iqbalance_fix_cc_0" not in block ids

>>> Error: Connection between iqbalance_fix_cc_0(0) and blocks_add_const_vxx_1(0) could not be made.

source block id "iqbalance_fix_cc_0" not in block ids

>>> Done

If I'm going to build my own flowcharts, I'll need to know what the blocks in the existing flows are doing, but I haven't seen any good resources for that.  If I can get some of the existing scripts to run properly that might help as well.  Any suggestions on that?  Here is the output when I run the pager_rx.py 

gr-osmosdr v0.1.0-66-g154c4ddd (0.1.1git) gnuradio 3.7.1

built-in source types: file fcd rtl_tcp bladerf rfspace 

[bladeRF source] Using nuand LLC bladeRF #0 SN 909d...c10c FW v1.6.1 FPGA v0.0.2

According to the readme this script is meant to be used with an RTL-SDR rather than my BladeRF but it seems to detect the blade and I don't see any hardware specific modules being imported.  Am I missing something?