Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Why Isn't GNU Radio Used More?

[Marcus D. Leech]

On 09/05/2011 12:39 PM, Vijay Pillai wrote:

I completely concur with what you wrote below and what Scott Johnson wrote some time ago.

USRP is an incredibly powerful platform and substantially low cost - I am somewhat befuddled by how it has not attained greater prevalence but at least some of the reasons are plainly obvious

- incomplete (or in some cases non-existent) documentation
- as a hardware engineer, my time is better spent in getting quickly to using the thing than to learn the nuances of Python
- it seems the vast majority of users today are software programmers, who may not be that averse to spending copious amounts of time on C++..

I find this attitude a little strange--not meaning to offend or anything.  But this is, in fact *software* defined radio.  So why is it always a big surprise
  when hardware types encounter an SDR platform and become more-than-vaguely-queasy at the though of having to, perhaps, learn a little bit
  about software.

Just as not every piece of combinatorial logic that could ever be conceived of hasn't already been implemented in the (digital) hardware world, so
  to in the software world, not every conceivable functional block having to do with folding/spindling/mutilating a digital sample stream has yet
  been created (and, by extension, the useful combinations of those fundamental blocks).  Which is why, well, those of us on either side of
  the fence (hardware or software) have jobs.

Similarly, when a software-only guy encounters SDR, they become vaguely offended that they might actually have to think about (shock!) hardware
  issues, and real-time scheduling, and the vagaries of propagation.  In the software world, you can just "add another layer of abstraction", to make
  your problems go away (or at least hide them under the covers sufficiently well that they're not so frightenting).  But in a sense, SDR in general,
  and Gnu Radio in particular, are "perfect storms" for the uninitiated.  You really, honestly, do have to *understand* things on both sides of
  the fence.  And there aren't too many practitioners out there who straddle the fence acceptably well at this point.