[Discuss-gnuradio] HF with SDR video, GR patches, gr-baz & new BorIP/ExtIO_USRP

[Balint Seeber]

Hi folks,

I’d like to share the following four releases with the community:

 

1.       This video: http://youtu.be/ZuRcaxpbYCw
which serves as an introduction to receiving HF with SDR (in this case a USRP+WBX+transverter). I explore some interesting/unusual signals (e.g. OTH RADAR, STANAG, OFDM/DRM) and analyse them using GNU Radio (e.g. Fast Auto-correlation, Cyclostationary analysis, MPSK demodulation), HDSDR and Sigmira. There are a few unknown signals in there too, so if you have any idea what they might be please comment on the YouTube page!

2.       A new release of ExtIO_USRP+FUNcube Dongle plugin for Winrad/HDSDR/WRplus, and BorIP server (version 1.1.1).
This uses UHD 003.003.001 so most/all models of USRP should be supported (not that you’d really need to use this with the LAN-accessible models – it’s more for the USB ones, so you can receive samples from them remotely). There is also improved support for the FUNcube Dongle, and some other minor fixes.

3.       Public release of gr-baz that contains several new blocks (many of which I’ve used for blind signal analysis and un-FEC’ing):

·         BorIP: fully functional & seamlessly-integrating client for GNU Radio (use all your existing flowgraphs with a remotely connected USRP).

·         AutoFEC: automatically try every combination of Forward Error Correction parameters when demodulating a complex symbol stream until the right one is chosen (i.e. a ‘lock’ is acquired).

·         Eye: GRC GUI eye diagram

·         Fast Auto-correlation Sink: GRC GUI graph

·         Variable Delay: change delay at runtime

·         Power: raise signal to a power and optionally divide by another power of 10

·         Print Char: output bytes (as hex) to console, or optionally a file, with squelch control and output limiting

·         Puncture/De-puncture: allows for perforated convolutional Forward Error Correction (change rate of mother code & insert erasures)

·         Swap: swap pairs of samples

·         Unpacked-to-packed: byte-to-byte version (take bits from incoming byte stream and repack certain # of bits into output byte stream)

Plus more! Grab it with SVN or fork it on github.

4.       Patches to GNU Radio that improve functionality of certain blocks (e.g. enable parameters to be changed at runtime that were otherwise fixed at design time):

·         GRC support for ‘Any’ Blocks: use any GR block without having to create a custom GRC XML block definition for it (just type in raw Python into the Any block)

·         Constellation sink: runtime adjustment of symbol rate (so you can experiment with changing symbol rate until symbols become sufficiently separated on plot)

·         Add Error Out output to gr_clock_recovery_mm_cc (graph it as a real-time measure of how it’s performing)

·         Add path metric from Viterbi as output to gr_decode_ccsds_27_fb as a measure of BER

·         Debug outputs of internal state of gr_mpsk_receiver_cc to allow for graphing of its performance (e.g. how well it maintains sync, great for evaluating quality of reception with signals of varying SNR)

·         Add BorIP packet decoding support to gr_udp_source (this is necessary for the gr-baz BorIP client to work!)

·         Enable reference vector to be changed at runtime for gr_vector_source_X

·         Enable gr_wavfile to open WAV files with the ‘auxi’ RIFF chunk (e.g. those created by HDSDR)

·         Make the gr_rational_resampler reconfigurable at runtime (i.e. change interp/decim values while the flowgraph is running, great for live experimentation with different resampling rates when trying to find correct symbol rate)

·         Alter audio passband, stopband and gain at runtime in blks2impl/am_demod

·         Add (experimental) fixes to gr_agc_cc so it doesn’t output NaNs when the input signal varies over an enormous range

·         Addition of seamless BorIP integration to gr-usrp so it is automatically imported (all flowgraphs will ‘just work’ with a remote USRP after setting default server address in ~/.gnuradio/config.conf)

And more! Also accessible via SVN and github above (patches are inside ‘gr-baz/patch’).

 

Certain bits still need some work, but I thought I’d finally better put it out there as perhaps others might like to contribute and take it further.

I hope there’s at least one item above that you will find useful! Let me know how you go…

 

Kind regards,

Balint @spenchdotnet