What Is GNU Radio?

Summary

What is GNU Radio? GNU Radio is a free & open-source software development toolkit that provides signal processing blocks to implement software radios. It can be used with readily-available low-cost external RF hardware to create software-defined radios, or without hardware in a simulation-like environment. It is widely used in research, industry, academia, government, and hobbyist environments to support both wireless communications research and real-world radio systems. Below shows an example flowgraph within the GNU Radio Companion visual editor: GNU Radio is a framework that enables users to design, simulate, and deploy highly capable real-world radio systems. It is a highly modular, "flowgraph"-oriented framework that comes with a comprehensive library of processing blocks that can be readily combined to make complex signal processing applications. GNU Radio has been used for a huge array of real-world radio applications, including audio processing, mobile communications, tracking satellites, radar systems, GSM networks, Digital Radio Mondiale, and much more - all in computer software. It is, by itself, not a solution to talk to any specific hardware. Nor does it provide out-of-the-box applications for specific radio communications standards (e.g., 802.11, ZigBee, LTE, etc.,), but it can be (and has been) used to develop implementations of basically any band-limited communication standard. Why would I want GNU Radio? Formerly, when developing radio communication devices, the engineer had to develop a specific circuit for detection of a specific signal class, design a specific integrated circuit that would be able to decode or encode that particular transmission and debug these using costly equipment. Software-Defined Radio (SDR) takes the analog signal processing and moves it, as far as physically and economically feasible, to processing the radio signal on a computer using algorithms in software. You can, of course, use your computer-connected radio device in a...