"What is the story of GNU Radio?
"Blossom initiated this project because he was disappointed by the SDR projects available at that time: all of them had a proprietary nature, and he wanted to bring the free-software philosophy into the SDR world. Richard Stallman, the GNU Project founder, liked Blossom's idea and agreed to take the project under the GNU aegis.
"So far, the GNU Radio project has not disappointed its affiliates and supporters. Eric Blossom, together with his development colleague Matt Ettus, have realized a project which can turn an ordinary PC into a good quality radio receiver; the only additional hardware required are a "low-cost" RF tuner and an analog-to-digital converter to convert the received signal into digital samples. GNU Radio is a free software development toolkit which allows to develop a custom non commercial radio receiver just combining and interconnecting appropriate software modules, as if they were functional blocks (the package include about 100 modules, but others can be added to the initial library). Each module is able to perform a specific signal processing function (for example a mixer, a phase lock loop, a filter), with a real-time behavior and with high-throughput; for this reason, a recent PC with enough processing capability and memory shall be used."
