GNU Radio: the open-source software defined Radio

“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.”

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