Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] GNU Radio Conference 2011

[Tom Rondeau]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 3:25 AM, Martin Braun <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 29, 2011 at 11:19:39PM -0400, Tuan (Johnny) Ta wrote:
>> Very interesting ideas. Thanks Marcus for sharing! Unfortunately I don't have
>> enough background in compiler to implement such ideas. I'm in the phase of
>> learning GNU Radio, keeping up with its fast development is already a big 
>> task
>> for me. I'm certainly willing to do something *to* GNU Radio when I'm more
>> capable and the opportunity presents. But I can definitely see some CS grad
>> student picking this up.
>>
>> My question is more of what I can look at/practice so that I can ask the 
>> right
>> questions at the conference, if my goal is to be familiar enough with GNU 
>> Radio
>> to implement my own applications/algorithms. Given that there are only 2 
>> weeks
>> left, I think wandering around might not be a good idea.
>
> Hi everyone,
>
> I actually think doing something *with* GNU Radio is the more
> interesting part, at least at the beginning. How about you start writing
> a receiver for your favourite comms standard?
>
> That way, you can start with a fairly simple environment, use a lot of
> code templates and concentrate on what you already know.
>
> Once you start doing that, you will inevitably end up with something
> that annoys you, something you feel is inefficient or whatever. Then
> you've got something to discuss about at the conference :)
>
> MB

Yeah, Martin, I think there is room for both. A point that I have
often brought up is that software radio is a mix of disciplines, all
of which are important in doing real, interesting things with
communications. But we do tend to specialize, so pushing the
boundaries of the technology in any direction is going to require
study and expertise in some areas over others. For comms people,
building new things with GNU Radio is probably the best thing that
they can do. Then, like you said, we'll learn where the platform
doesn't perform and hopefully work on fixing it.

For those more inclined to the CS side of things, doing something like
Marcus suggested might be better. We have a lot of optimization that
we can do with GNU Radio. We will hopefully start including VOLK soon
to take advantage of vectorization in our processors. The
implementation of VOLK had little to do with any knowledge of
communications. Instead, there was a recognized need for improved
performance that lead to some slick work that made VOLK possible.

In other words. There's plenty to do for people of all persuasions :)

Tom