[Discuss-gnuradio] Gaining RSSI, SNR, CNR or BER information

[Bastian Preindl]

Hi,

I'm a project member of the global education network for satellite
operations (Genso, www.genso.org) and currently working on gaining
comparable link quality information when having an RX communication with
satellites.

As we'll probably support GnuRadio on a broad base (both using a USRP or
a soundcard as ADC) I hope that it can help me to get more valuable
information out of it than possible when using traditional hardware
radios and TNCs (what I currently get is the Signal strength reading on
a very low sample rate (one second), and that's hardware dependent).

As we're not the operator of the satellites, it is impossible to know
the data we'll receive beforehand and make a comparison afterwards to
calculate the bit error rate. So I have to count on information I can
gain from the received signal characteristics. So I wonder if GnuRadio
provides facilities to measure the signal (or carrier) to noise ratio
(or the energy per bit per noise power spectral density) or the
(approximate) bit error rate - or if it depends on the used blocks, or
the ADC (if it's a soundcard or the USRP). I've read about possibilities
to receive the RSSI when using the USRP, but it seems to depend on the
daugtherboards (and unavailable when using a sound card).

So I would appreciate _any_ possibility to gain information which helps
me to determine the quality of a communicaton link using GnuRadio.

Thank you very much in advance

Bastian