Two parallel tutorial tracks will be held, one introducing basic concepts of using GNU Radio, digital signal processing using synthetic signals, and analyzing a radiofrequency signal using GNU Radio. The second more advanced track will involve writing custom (OOT) processing blocks for GNU Radio 3.8, using GNU Radio on embedded Systems on Chips (SoC) and using messages.

Please select when registering to the conference which tutorials you would be most interested to attend so we can plan on room size and how many times each tutorial must be repeated.

Introductory tutorials

1. GNU Radio basics

GNU Radio introductory presentation, from data formats to basic processing blocks and accessing the sound card as hardware peripheral. While GNU Radio and its graphical user interface GNU Radio Companion makes the generation of the underlying Python code painless, the underlying digital signal processing principles remain for the developer to be properly addressed, such as designing filters with reasonable characteristics to require reasonable processing power (reasonable will be defined in this tutorial), or keeping the datarate constant along the processing chain despite interpolation or decimation, making sure that the sink datarate is consistent with the source datarate.

2. radiofrequency signal analysis using GNU Radio

Having become familiar with the basics of GNU Radio, we analyze a consumer hardware control signal emitted in the European Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) 434 MHz band by observing signals collected by a low-cost Digital Video Broadcast-Terrestrial (DVB-T) receiver. The signal characteristics are analyzed from the radiofrequency layer to the digital data format.

3. digital signal processing using synthetic signals with GNU Radio

GNU Radio does not remove any of the complexity of discrete time digital signal processing, it just makes much more fun to investigate. Using synthetic signals, we tackle more advanced signal processing topics such as the Hilbert transform, why signals are complex or how to make them so when collecting real signals, and how to compute instantaneous phases.

Advanced tutorials

1. analyzing the S2-LP radiofrequency link

The ST Microelectronics S2-LP communication layers are analyzed using GNU Radio, from the radiofrequency modulation schemes to the digital communication layer.

2. writing a custom processing block for GNU Radio 3.8

While creating custom (Out of Tree -- OOT) blocks is widely documented, GNU Radio 3.8 and its new gr_modtool brings some novely worth investigating.

3. GNU Radio on embedded systems using buildroot

Embedded systems are often used as peripherals to personnal computers for collecting radiofrequency datastreams and have them processed by the host computer running GNU Radio. Because of the limited bandwidth between the collecting and processing hardware, some preliminary processing is often performed on the embedded board, most often by the FPGA collecting the datastreams. Wouldn't it be nice to complement these preliminary processing steps with custom processing blocks ? But since FPGAs now often come fitted with a hardware processing systems (Xilinx's Zynq, Altera/Intel System on Chip), why not avoid the communication bottleneck alltogether and run GNU Radio on the embedded processor ? These re the benefits provided by porting GNU Radio to the Buildroot cross-compilation environment, and the OscImpDigital framework.

4. tags and messages

Digital signals can be tagged, e.g. by correlating with a preable, to indicate which part of the setence is being analyzed. Using tags and messages will be demonstrated on ADS-B signals broadcast by planes at 1090 MHz.