CUWS Talk – Feb 14th 1900 – GNU Radio: A toolkit for the Wireless World

The talk will be from 1900 in the Bateman Auditorium at Caius College on Thursday Feb 14th. All are welcome.

Speaker:
Derek Kozel is an officer in the GNU Radio project, president of the Cardiff University Amateur Radio society, and a PhD researcher at the Centre for High Frequency Engineering. He operates as MW0LNA primarily on the microwave bands and has a strong interest in Free and Open Source Software and enabling the use and understanding of wireless digital communications by students and in Amateur Radio.

Description:
The way we send information, whether voice, text, images, or video, has been evolving since Samuel Morse’s telegraph in 1836. As these systems become more advanced the standard electronics tools and knowledge which have been the Amateur Radio operator’s standard toolkit must be accompanied by software components. Together the analog, digital, and software are used to enable the modern communications modes such as Digital Video Broadcast (DVB), JT65 for moonbounce, FreeDV which has brought digital voice to the HF bands, and the wide variety of other new and exciting protocols.
GNU Radio (www.gnuradio.org) is a free, graphical, software development toolkit that provides signal processing blocks to implement software-defined radios and signal-processing systems. It can be used with external RF hardware to create software-defined radios, or without hardware in a simulation environment. This talk introduces the software, demonstrates assembling complete transmit and receive systems, and shows a few examples of advanced applications.