Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] SDR article: Missing no links

[Eric Blossom]

Hi,

I'm not sure who wrote the bit of a rant, but in any case, I wish you
the best.  I'm the person who is currently doing most of the work on
GNU Radio.

On Tue, Dec 04, 2001 at 04:22:10PM -0500, Vanu Bose wrote:
> I thought I'd respond to this and let you all know that we not only
> welcome, but encourage, a good open source implementation of
> SpectrumWare. If we did not, we would not have put it in the public
> domain in the first place. At MIT we benefitted greatly from open
> source software, and I felt that it was important to contribute
> something back. In addition, we want to create awareness about
> software radio, and I think this open source implementation will be a
> great help.

Thanks.  I enjoyed all the papers as well as the actual
implementation.  Nothing like getting a good running start.

> As you all are aware, the code was not that great (although Brett
> Vasconcellos' pSpectra implementation was a tremendous
> improvement). The code was meant to validate a concept, and if you
> guys can make it into a more reliable and robust system, that would be
> fantastic. I'm impressed with how far you've gotten, I'm not sure I
> could get SpectrumWare to compile anymore.

I've spent several months separating the wheat from the chaff.  In
addition I've written a "Guppi" style driver for the Measurement
Computing PCI DAS4020/12, a 4 channel, 12-bit 20 MSPS A/D card.  It
was the fastest, cheapest card I could locate that was capable of
continuous streaming.  This provides us with an off-the-shelf solution
that at least gets us into the multi-channel, multi-mode game.

There is a wealth of good ideas and concepts in the code.  Part of
what I've been working toward is getting it cleaned up to a point
where folks can easily build useful and/or educational demos.

I've also got a vision of evolving it into something along the lines
of Agilent's 89600 Vector Signal Analyzer product.

> We intend to make some of the software we are writing at the company
> open source, in particular the Radio Description Language (RDL) which
> is the java portion of the system. We will post a paper describing
> some work implementing GSM in RDL on our web site in the near
> future. I hope that the open source community decides to pick this up,
> our hope is that RDL will facilitate portable waveform
> implementations.

This sounds very interesting.  Thanks for letting us know.

> The results of our consulting work, and the core software will not be
> public domain, as that is what we intend to build our business
> around. I see the public domain effort as complimentary, and we'll
> support it where we can.
>
>
> Regards,
> 
> Vanu

Thanks for taking the time to write.  I look forward to seeing what
you come up with.  FYI, we'll be making the first release of "GNU
Radio" later this week.

If you happen to get out to the SF bay area, please contact me.  I'd
like to show you what we've done with Spectra and compare notes.
Dinner is on me.

Eric