Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] "GNU Radio is crap" and GSoc

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 11:26 AM,  <address@hidden> wrote:
> Tom makes the point that Gnu Radio isn't "shiny".  Indeed, it isn't.
>
> Some people arrive at Gnu Radio expecting that it is an "end application",
> and walk away badly disappointed. They have in their mind a firm notion of
> what constitutes a "radio", and fully expect that Gnu Radio *is* that
> "radio", except that it has GUI widgets instead physical controls.  For this
> class of "customer" for Gnu Radio, I blame the early ham-radio SDR market,
> and the suppliers thereto.  They packaged their SDR hardware with

And at the same time they're doing an incredible disservice to the SDK-universe
by not enabling the kind of DSP experimentation that SDR can enable!
GNURadio does a reasonable job of enabling that stuff— or at least I
found it pretty easy to build my own radio toys and get on the air.
Much easier than assembling an analog radio from components at least.

Though I think that there is a gap here:  People hesitate to buy the
hardware needed to support gnuradio because they aren't sure that
they'll get around to the some-assembly-required part.    It would be
nice if there were a few end user applications so that people would be
comfortable that they wouldn't just end up with more junk they'll
never get around to using... and to also serve as starting boards for
development: If your grand idea is an automatic GPS linked repeater
directory for ham radio, it kinda sucks that to build that idea with
GNU radio you first have to build the a whole frequency-duplexing
radio.

... but the solution to that gap isn't to complain about it, — it's to
write the software. If no one wants to do that, all the complaining in
the world won't help.