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

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Mon, May 9, 2011 at 2:59 PM, Andrew Lentvorski <address@hidden> wrote:
> No embedded engineer who values his job will touch a GPL piece of code with
> a 10 foot pole.  Period.

…and these are folks who will be out-competed in the marketplace by
competitors who are more agile and less phobic.

[From the original article]
> Conversely, the DSA community seems to want to keep reinventing
> solutions. Every year we see demos that are slightly more polished
> and maybe a bit more expansive than the previous year's, but we still
> aren't really seeing huge leaps and bounds in the technology that I
> think we could and should be seeing.

The obvious explanation is that there isn't actually a market in this space
people build things here in order to demonstrate how smart and capable
they are— advancing the art is _hard_ and isn't strictly necessary
for just showing that you know how to build yet another slightly better
wisbang.


Marcus D. Leech wrote:
> I think there's a significant community out there that learned DSP
> techniques inside the envelope of Matlab/Simulink, and that's what
> they're comfortable with.    To change this, Gnu Radio has to appear
> in more places in academia, so that graduating engineers have already
> been exposed to it, and find it "natural".

One positive thing here is that python (esp with scipy/numpy) has been
aggressively replacing matlab/octave in many areas. It seems that
that this has gone slower RF DSP area, but this shouldn't be surprising
because there is a larger dependency on canned DSP objects than in
some other areas.



Personally, I don't find the adoption curves surprising. The entry cost
for GNURadio + USRP are low compared to traditional tools, but those
who could afford those are mostly already comfortable with the toolset
they already know.  The entry costs are very high compared to pure
software activities or heavily commodity activities.  If someone is
doing development of high level communication systems using standard
ethernet $20 off the shelf 802.11 gear then the cost (in terms of time
and hardware) of doing _anything_ with GNURadio are basically astronomic.
(And they would still be even if the USRP were free, though less so)