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Recently I had the good fortune to chat with Eric Blossom, founder and driving force behind GNU Radio. We recorded this technology overview conversation, wherein we chatted about what GNU Radio is, some development issues, and future work.

GNU Radio has come a long way since its inception, and now includes a growing, dedicated community of developers and RF experimentalists. Eric has been instrumental in this growth, but so, too, has Matt Ettus with his open hardware platform USRP. USRP gives GNU Radio developers a common hardware platform on which to meet and grow new apps.

GNU Radio is easily one of my favorite open source projects anywhere. If I can only get time to do some GNU Radio development myself. Anyway…

• The Ogg Vorbis version (8Mb). If you can play Vorbis media (xmms), please fetch this version and save me some bits.
• The mp3 version (27Mb).

[tags]gnuradio, software radio, eric blossom[/tags]

Does anyone know if there are unlicensed HF bands in the US, as there are unlicensed UHF ISM bands where WiFi has bloomed?

Ham operators have been operating on low power (sub 5W) for years. But how cool would it be to open a slice of the HF band to unlicensed low power use, and see what cool services would emerge. Owing to the physics of wave propagation, longer HF radio waves travel further easier than short VHF and UHF waves. HF propagation is also more susceptible to atmospheric conditions, but that’s ok — that’s part of the challenge. We’re talking about 10-80m roughly, which means antenna sizes change relative to the familiar 10cm-ish WiFi antennas. For example, at 10m the antenna needs to be about 15ft long.

To whet the appetite, here is some very cool work done in licensed spectrum in HF digital radio.

Hmm.

The open source creative outlet of my early teen years was the Heathkit radio product line. Buy the kit, assemble the radio yourself, and learn a lot about how the radio works in the process. Smell the solder while you’re at it. This, like everything else with fond memories (new-car smell), is of course now bad for your health. Well, whatever. Smell the solder anyway.

Get a ham Technician license, which is real easy. If you like wireless as a superset of WiFi, you’ll get to send your radio signals across the world rather than just around the house.

And then check out the $130 NorCal40a or the higher end $600 Elecraft. Building these kits gets a guy outside the pure software world into the physical realm, where the winding spacing on toroids matters.

That said, if you prefer a mix of hardware and software, take that $600+ and get yourself an Ettus Research USRP, a platform on which you can do GNU Software Radio. GNU Radio has an active developer community, and will support you while you learn how to make the radio do what you want it to do via signal processing code you write.

Wireless is more than just WiFi. Check ‘em out.

[tags]ham radio, software radio, radio kits, gnuradio[/tags]