Martin Braun

The year 2020 had some interesting organizational updates for the GNU Radio project. We summarize the changes, describe the new leadership structure, and show how we intend these changes to propagate into the future.

In 2020, the GNU Radio organization went through some major changes. In the past, the leadership of GNU Radio followed a "benevolent dictator" model. This is an efficient leadership structure, but it assumes dictators' benevolence, and is not a scalable model. Starting 2020, we have a new leader ship team (the General Assembly), and a new Board. With the exception of the initial General Assembly, all members are elected, and there's an official process in place to keep the organization going.

On top of that, we merged with The SETI Project. We are hopeful that this collaboration is a great win for both parties, and we'll talk about why.

In the 1940s, Shannon proved that we can transmit data error-free depending on rate and SNR. In practical radios, we need to employ forward error correction (FEC) to achieve those rates. GNU Radio has a built-in component to handle FEC, called gr-fec. After some basics of FEC, we will see how GNU Radio does this, and how it can be extended.

Welcome talk.

This will be a FOSDEM first: Instead of a panel, this year's interactive time slot will be a bring-your-own-radio hack session. Bring your stuff, show us what it can do! We will have the mic open for demonstrating, but you can also huddle (as far as the room permits) around your devices and show them off.

The Open Source Radio Telescope initiative is a group of educators and radio astronomy enthusiasts, trying to bring the world of radio astronomy closer to the people. We provide projects and education to anyone who wants to join. Find more about the project at: http://opensourceradiotelescopes.org/

gr-radar is an out-of-tree module (OOT) for GNU Radio that came about during a Google Summer of Code. Let's take a look at this OOT together, see what it can do, and see what it could become!

In 2014, during the Google Summer of Code (GSoC), Stefan Wunsch took existing radar codes and freed them by publishing them as an OOT. The module was extended by several others, mostly students from the Comunications Engineering Lab at KIT, Karlsruhe, Germany. This presentation will take the toolbox and check out it's current capabilities, giving a short introduction into radar, the toolbox itself, and what it could become.

Once again, we meet in Brussels, at FOSDEM, to talk about the state of free software SDR. The intro will recap the year, and give some updates on what's new and great in the SDR world.

Most SDR hardware nowadays includes an FPGA of sorts, but how to make use of them in an SDR application is often unclear for newcomers to the SDR ecosystem. Even more daunting can be to take first steps into FPGA-land and start writing code for your reprogrammable chips. We will talk about how an FPGA is actually useful for SDRs on an very basic level, and provide a very basic introduction into how to use the RFNoC framework to start using (and maybe learning) FPGAs.

The following topics will be covered: - How are FPGAs already available in modern SDR hardware? - Which tasks are FPGAs well suited to tackle? - When do we move tasks to an FPGA, and when do we not? - How can we enter the realm of FPGA development using the RFNoC framework?

The state of SDR, and free/open SDR in particular, is interesting. In some cases, SDR research and progress has been declared dead, implying that there is nothing left to research or develop. Practical usage of SDR tells a different story, though, and users of SDR products run into all sorts of issues every day.

In this panel, we would like to discuss with the audience what the top issues are that SDR frameworks need to solve in the near future -- be they technical, legal, political or anything else.

What are the top 3 items that the realm of Software Defined Radio needs to figure out? In this panel, we invite some experts as well as the entire audience to discuss this question. We shall discuss technical challenges (if there are any) as well as legal and political challenges. Does free/open software radio have any different questions to tackle? If we were to attend a technical conference in the near future, what would be the most mind-blowing thing we could present? Will there be more, competing frameworks going forward, or will they consolidate? These and many more questions shall be the topic of this year's SDR panel.

Welcome to the Software Defined Radio track! As in the last couple of years, we will talk about anything related to software defined radio: Interesting hacks, SDR hardware, wireless security, homebrew radar, academical research, etc. Here, we introduce the track and topics, and welcome all fans and afficionados of the SDR track!

The software defined radio track has been part of FOSDEM since 2014, and has been choc-a-block with talks an all kinds of topics related to software defined radio. This year again, we'll be talking about a variety of topics ranging from interesting hacks to SDR hardware, wireless security, homebrew radar, academical research and many other things that fall into this wide field.

RFNoC is a framework to simplify FPGA development for DSP processing. It is fully open source and integrates well into GNU Radio. In this talk, RFNoC is presented and demoed.

RFNoC (RF Network on Chip) is a powerful framework to simply FPGA development for DSP processing. RFNoC applications are mostly heterogeneous signal processing applications, where workload is shared between the FPGA and GPP, and tasks are assigned to whichever hardware is more appropriate.

RFNoC integrates well into GNU Radio, the most popular free software DSP framework. It is fully open source and currently works with the X310 and E310 USRPs.

SDR projects have come a long way, and allow users to do all sorts of things, ranging from telecoms services (e.g. setting up a base station) to all kinds of scientific purposes (radio astronomy, DSP, etc.).

In this panel, we want to bring together leaders from various projects as well as community members, and discuss the future of free SDR, and identify possible areas of collaboration.

As SDR communities, we will discuss these topics (among others):

• What are the near- and long-term goals for free SDR projects?
• How can we collaborate?
• Have we missed areas where we could use more action (between GNU Radio and the others we have the scientific stuff and the telecoms stuff sorted out, but what else is there)?
• Which communities do we want to engage with?

We invite project leaders, but also all community members to join us for this discussion.

GNU Radio comes with myriad tools that make development easier. This presentation will highlight the most useful tools and show how hackers can smoothly and without much effort start hacking DSP or radio applications, skipping the overhead of writing boilerplate code or setting up development environment.

This presentation will cover the usage of: - The GNU Radio LiveSDR - PyBOMBS (or whatever its successor is) - gr-modtool - Editor plugins - Graphical widgets

The opening talk for the SDR devroom at FOSDEM 2016.

At the opening talk for the software defined radio devroom, we'll introduce the speakers, the projects and the organizers.

GNU Radio is a powerful tool for signal processing of any kind. It is very much suited for setting up any kind of communication link. In this tutorial, we will discuss how to set up a PHY that can be attached to an application and MAC layer in order to experiment with arbitrarily configured wireless networks.

Tutorial overview: * OFDM blocks basics * How to set up links between nodes * How to start working on MACs

This year is the first year that FOSDEM will have a developer room dedicated to Software Defined Radio. Here, we will present a quick overview of SDR projects out there and those attending FOSDEM and then start off the day.