Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Suggestions for newbies?

[Eric Blossom]

On Sun, May 28, 2006 at 03:40:39PM -0500, James Longstreet wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I recently started reading about Gnu Radio, and I think it would make  
> a great project for my university's ACM chapter.  My EE/radio  
> experience is pretty much limited to RadioShack kits and building a  
> shortwave receiver, but I have lots of programming experience.  I'm  
> confident that I can wrap my head around the concepts at least enough  
> to make things work.

Good.  I don't think you'll find it overly challenging.

> From everything I've read, it seems that the USRP is the way to go  
> for hardware - relatively inexpensive, designed to work with Gnu  
> Radio, and general enough to allow for just about anything.  What can  
> I hope to accomplish with a USRP - AM/FM radio? TV? HDTV?

If you get a USRP with the "TV Rx" daughterboard, FM will work out of
the box.

> Also, what kind of timeframe would be reasonable for playing around  
> with this?  Should I expect to be able to receive FM radio the day I  
> take my USRP out of the box,

Yes.

> or will I have to fiddle with things for a few weeks/months?  I
> don't mind spending time with it, but I'd like to know what I'm
> getting myself into before I spend $700 on it.

> What reading should I do to get up to speed on concepts I'm going to  
> be running into?  I understand radio at a conceptual level, but DSP  
> and things like that are foreign to me.

Check out http://comsec.com/wiki?SuggestedReading for pointers to good
info.  If you're interested in getting up to speed on DSP, Richard
Lyons' book is a good place to start.

> Thank you,
> 
> James Longstreet
> System Administrator
> Association for Computing Machinery
> University of Illinois at Chicago

Eric