"You need a radio to play with GNU Radio" is the most common misconception. There would be more fun if you have one, but GNU Radio itself doesn't require a radio. It's actually a general-propose signal processing and simulation tool, and a lot of things can be done without hardware.<p>For example, you can simulate different modulation techniques and observe them in time and frequency domain, or you can simulate an amplifier and change its the input level on an interactive GUI control panel you programmed to understand how an overdriven/saturated amplifier produces intermodulation distortion, or experimenting with different transmitter/receiver architecture (superheterodyne, direct conversion, etc).<p>Traditionally, these experiments can only be done in a lab with a scope and a spectrum analyzer. But now it's all possible on your desktop.
I made an SSB receiver in GRC, that was educational. SSB doesn’t have a carrier so you have to provide your own (GRC has a block that can generate a sine wave of a given frequency). The ability to probe the graph anywhere makes learning easier in a way that physical building wouldn’t be.<p>Ironically i was doing a bit more on my little RTL SDR web view tonight: <a href="https://github.com/craigjperry2/websdr" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/craigjperry2/websdr</a>
Anyone have good suggestions for playing around with SDR on OSX? I tried installing GNU Radio a couple of years ago with homebrew and it was quite a mess.
An FM receiver is the first thing in every GRC tutorial. I just wish there was something useful that one can receive with one of these standard $15 RTL-SDR receivers that isn't super complicated or FM radio.
holy FUCK<p>GNU Radio has such horrible documentation I can never get right. I tried decoding APRS with GNU Radio but I gave up because there's like approximately 0 documentation on what the GFSK decode block does.<p>I can't believe I advocated for this project. Learning GNU Radio generally requires talking to a guru to pass the information via oral history.
The rise of internet radio has made it pretty difficult to obtain a really good FM tuner these days regardless of the price.<p>In fact, I'm not aware of anything with real diversity reception-- at most they're limited to crossfading two tuners, and even that is mostly a car radio feature.<p>I wonder if anyone has been working on an open source state of the art SDR broadcast FM receiver.<p>A good receiver would have denoising of the stereo signal, filters to eliminate HD radio interference, PLL/matched demod of the stereo signal, and support diversity reception using constant modulus algorithm or similar.
Just in case: <a href="https://epxx.co/artigos/pythonfm_en.html" rel="nofollow">https://epxx.co/artigos/pythonfm_en.html</a>
I’ll plug the scanner I wrote. It’s not a normal scanner, in that it allows parallel demodulation and recording of FM and air-band AM:<p><a href="https://github.com/madengr/ham2mon" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/madengr/ham2mon</a>