[Discuss-gnuradio] ESA SOCIS project Announcement

[Johannes Demel]

Hey GNU Radio community!

Thanks for choosing my project for this year's ESA Summer of Code in
Space. I will implement a POLAR code encoder decoder chain as well as
channel construction.

I would like to introduce myself a bit today.
I am a Master degree student at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
(KIT), Germany. My major is focused on Communication at Communications
Engineering Lab (CEL). Also, I was a student research assistant at CEL
up until the start of ESA SOCIS. During my studies and work I acquired
advanced skills in digital signal processing, waveform design and
software engineering. My fields of interest are Software-Defined Radio
development and system optimization.
I got in touch with GNU Radio back in 2012 when I started my Bachelor
thesis on LTE signal reception with GNU Radio. The outcome of this
thesis is available on Github. I continued working on this project
afterwards. During the course of gr-lte development I touched a great
variety of different parts of GNU Radio. Firstly adopting and
integrating existing blocks into the project. Secondly learning a lot
about GNU Radio internals like scheduler specifics, class inheritance
structures and VOLK usage. Also, I improved my knowledge to write test
code in order to improve code quality.
Besides my studies at KIT I did an internship at Ettus Research in
2013/14, fostering my programming skills and deepening my GNU Radio
knowledge. During that time I contributed to Ettus’ UHD driver and
developed tools for use with GNU Radio. Recently I contributed to GNU
Radio by adding a rename capability to its modtool tool.
Besides my experience with GNU Radio and thus with C ++ and Python, I
also did several smaller projects. That includes closed source
projects at university level with Java and Java for Android. I did
microcontroller programming in ANSI C and Assembler. This included
integration of an IP microcontroller into an existing VHDL project.
During the course of the project, I will have access to CEL’s labs and
equipment. And Sebastian Koslowski, who is currently with CEL, agreed
on mentoring my project. Thus I will always be able to talk to him
personally about project progress and pitfalls.
I read GNU Radio’s Code of Conduct and understood and agree to it,
including the three strikes rule. They are natural to follow and
essential for a positive and prospering community. I am looking
forward to publish my weekly project updates.

I will host my project on Github [1]. In case you are curious about
the project goals and haven't already read my proposal, you can find
it on Github too [2].

I am happy to get started with the project now. Stay tuned for weekly
updates. In case you have questions or feedback, don't hesitate to
email me. I am grateful to get more input and suggestions on the project.

My goal for the upcoming weeks is to implement a encoder decoder chain
in Python which shall serve as testcode later on.

Cheers
Johannes

[1] https://github.com/jdemel/gnuradio
[2] https://github.com/jdemel/socis-proposal