Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] gnuradios place in the state of the art of SDR

[Mabel Pita]

Hi,

Thank you so much for your answers.

Maybe i did not express myself correctly in my original mail.

I am taking a course on SDRs at my university, and an assignment is to do some research about SDRs, especially on the state of the art of SDR, by this i mean, the most cutting edge technology that is available nowadays on the field. I have not been able to found information about this on the internet, just different frameworks used for developing SDRs. However, i have  to justify somehow, that gnu radio is useful for serious academical research and not a program for modest projects (not that i think that is this way but i have to justify it somehow). For example, quote some important projects developed in gnuradio, or important companies working with gnu radio, etc.

Are there any books or papers that investigate this matter, and explain thoroughly what is the most advanced technology to perform virtualization of signal processing and why gnu radio is a good choice for this task?

Thanks in advance.

2016-02-22 18:22 GMT-03:00 Michael Berman <address@hidden>:

Mabel,

I am kind of confused as to what you mean by "state of the art".  I personally would consider any SDR to be pretty state of the art; it has been around for some years, but it is by no means common place.

Being unfamiliar with SDRsharp, a quick google search and read through of their website seems that the software is tuned fairly narrowly towards their custom hardware which would be quite lacking in many more advanced applications due to its USB 2.0 interface.  From this, you can only take a look at up to 10 MHz of spectrum at a time, and the overall bandwidth of the product seems like it may be a nuance for some applications as it will only go from 20 MHz to 1.8 GHz.  Also, the SDRsharp software states it can be used "with their partner hardware".  If you are setting up a learning environment, this may be restrictive in terms of capabilities of testing and system designs by their and their partners hardware limitations.  One last thing, their software seems to be closed source.  You cannot make changes or see how things are done internally, all you have is the API.

GNURadio is 100% open sourced and will work with a myriad of just about any SDR hardware out there.  All that needs to be done is a small interface set of code be written to conform the hardware with GNURadio's code structure.  With this, as long as there is even an API for a hardware device, it is feasible that any hardware could be interface with and use GNURadio (there is already such code available for the airspy which is the base hardware for SDRsharp).  Also, with GNURadio being open source, if you wonder the exact algorithm that something is using, you can go look at the source code.  Also, if there is something extremely custom that would be much better off with a custom code block than piecing it together with pre-defined blocks.

From my point of view (having used GNURadio for an academic project) I would much prefer GNURadio.  Being open source and having a community backing it as it does let's you actually learn what's going on, instead of taking it at as a black box, and never really knowing how things work at a lower level.

Hope my rant finds some use.

Michael Berman

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 12:48 PM, Mabel Pita <address@hidden> wrote:

Hello,

I am just starting to get into the world of SDRs, and i have been looking for information about SDRs state of the art, and this is when i found GNURadio and SDRsharp as the top contenders. 

I know that i am writing to the gnuradio mailing list so i wont talk about its competitors, but can someone tell me in an objective way whether gnuradio is considered state of the art in the matter of sdrs? 

Are there any books / sites that treat this subject in a thorough manner? I am doing this for a course at my college and it requires as a first step to get a good knowledge of the state of the art in sdrs.

Thanks in advance.

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