Day 1: Introduction to GNU Radio and RTL SDR receiver

Topic of the GNU Radio Tutorial Tutorial 1: Introduction to GNU Radio

Two suggestions for improving or extending the tutorial:
1. Using the current live disk provided in the USB flash drive, we were not able to save our work for
future use. I assume if we use software like UNETBOOTIN, we can configure a mount volume to
save the work if we are planning to remove the flash drive and re-run it somewhere. Best case
would be to prepare a VM image and run in a virtual box or VM player.
2. An important topic that would be great if covered in this tutorial is how we came up with the
GNU Radio in a particular distribution. May be one weeks time would be spent by each student
will spend time on cloning GNU Radio repository into his favorite LINUX distribution and try to
build from its source along with its associated components. Then run the tutorials onto the GNU
Radio stack that he just built and installed in his system.
Questions:
1. How about building and installing GNU Radio on embedded platforms? Will that be a very
informative as SDR development are mostly focused towards embedded systems?
2. How easy can the GNU Radio companion be for a regular first time Software Radio Developer
who has very little knowledge about programming?
Topic of the GNU Radio Tutorial Tutorial 2: RTL SDR FM Receiver
Two suggestions for improving or extending the tutorial:
1. This tutorial covered a very important aspect of GNU Radio and involved a challenging theme of
getting RTL SDR to work with GNU Radio. Again, if this process would have been like installing
it in a fresh distribution, it would have been more challenging.
2. An extension to this tutorial would be having a lab session with teams of two working on a single
USRP and trying to implement a simple transmitter and receiver using GNU Radio and
programming it onto the USRPs and test how it works.
Questions:
1. Can you build a FM demodulator that would continuously scan a band and would automatically
switch over to the frequency where it found the energy level increasing to the desired level
above threshold?
2. If we collect spectrum data from a RTL-SDR, will that be feasible to study spectrum sharing,
Dynamic spectrum Access and other cognitive radio concepts?
Day 2: Out-of-tree module
Topic of the GNU Radio Tutorial
Tutorial 1: Creating an out-of-tree module
Tutorial 2: Writing a block (square_ff) in C++
Tutorial 3: Writing a signal processing block in Python
Two suggestions for improving or extending the tutorial:
1. More information on ways or tools to debug GNU Radio block implementation whether it is in
C++ or in Python
2. In addition to GNU Radio tutorials on out-of-tree modules where we were introduced on how to
create a gnuradio-companion block, we could have had a small assignment of coming up with
some simple DSP block of our own. There could have been some examples on what could be
actually built as a module and compare it with the actual implementation.
Questions:
1. Which is the best in terms of optimized implementation of a GNU radio module/block, a C++
implementation or a python implementation? (Though python sounds to be a very easy
language to implement stuff, how efficiently will your module work if it written in python)
2. Is it possible to make sub-modules or sub-blocks and re-use that while implementing our GNU
Radio blocks?