Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] dive into gnu-radio

[Andrej Rode]

Hi Desmond and everyone else, 

> With my knowledge the mechanics of
> writing an OOT module and getting it to show up in GRC is fairly simple.
> It's the knowledge of radio signals and digital signal processing where I
> have the most difficulty.

as a EE student I can recommend getting familiar with the concepts taught in 
the lectures 'Signals & Systems', 'Digital Communications I+II' and maybe 
'Digital Signal Processing'. Material as well as recordings can be found at 
[0]. Before looking through the lectures you should now there are some 
requirements in mathematics you should know. For someone with a (university) 
background in CS I think there should be a way to get in touch with integral 
transforms/discrete integral transforms and the concept behind 
digital/discrete thinking.

Concering literature I would recommend to look for a book with a title 
'Signals and Systems', unfortunatly I can only name a german book for 
recommendation for this one.  If you are familiar with the basic concept of 
signal processing you could try to get your hands on 'Digital Communications' 
by John G. Proakis. It is written in a very mathematical way but you should be 
able to understand the concepts behind it and then verify them by looking 
through GNU Radio blocks or writing some blocks yourself. 

That is what I can recommend you from an EE students' point of view. I started 
dealing with signal processing about two years ago. And I think with a 
background in some kind of university mathematics you should be able to grasp 
the basic concepts of digital signal processing in about a half year or less.
Most of the thinks in DSP are based on math and so are the blocks/Code in GNU 
Radio.

If there is something missing or I am wrong, correct me :)

Best Regards, 
Andrej

[0] http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/