GNU Radio Opens an Unseen World
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,70933-0.html
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By Quinn Norton| Also by this reporter
02:00 AM Jun, 05, 2006
Matt Ettus has the sly smile of someone who sees the invisible. His hands
fly over the boards of his Universal Software Radio Peripheral, or USRP,
snapping them together with an antenna like Lego bricks. Then he plugs in
the naked boards to a USB 2 cable snaking to his Linux laptop.
After few minutes of normal Linux messing around ("Takes forever to
boot.... Haven't got the sound driver working yet....") he turns the laptop
around to reveal a set of vibrating lines in humps and dips across the
screen, like a wildly shaking wireframe mountain range. "Here," he
explains, "I'm grabbing FM."
"All of it?" I ask.
"All of it," he says. I'm suddenly glad the soundcard isn't working.
Radio is that bit of the electromagnetic spectrum that sits between brain
waves and daylight. It's made of the same stuff that composes light, color,
electrical hums, gamma radiation from atom bombs, the microwaves that
reheat your pizza.
From our perspective, radio devices behave very differently -- a global
positioning system gadget doesn't look like a TV doesn't look like a CB
set, even if they are all radios. They are single-purpose machines that use
small bits of radio spectrum to do very specific tasks -- about as far from
the general-purpose personal computer as you can get. But there's no reason
they have to be.
Most of the required components of a radio are the same and can be
generalized. And with Moore's law making processors fast enough, much of a
radio's function can be done with software.
Building a general radio that can receive and transmit, and attaching it to
a software system that can fill in the gaps of what we normally think of as
radio, is kind of like the Enterprise's deflector dish: Give engineering 20
minutes and it can do anything the captain needs to move the plot along.
One of Ettus' USRPs, with the right daughterboards and radio software, can
capture FM, read GPS, decode HDTV, transmit over emergency bands and open
garage doors.
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Received on Sat Mar 02 2024 - 00:57:17 CST