February 26, 2018

An Interview with Derek Kozel

1 hour 54 minutes

Welcome, Derek Kozel of Ettus Research (a National Instruments company) and the GNUradio project!

Derek recently moved to Cardiff, Wales (UK). His new house will soon be outfitted with many antennas.

At university he was part of the ham radio club (W3VC), which got him into the whole industry.

Repeaters

Chris suggested a Baofeng as an HT (which was met with disgust). Derek uses a Yaesu VX-6

After college Derek went to work at SpaceX on sensor networks.

Derek now works at Ettus Research. We had the founder Matt Ettus on the show in episode 101.

Just a sampling of SDR applications

Radar for space debris (?)

Ultrasound

MRI machine on the desktop

Hard parts of SDR

Software

Filters

Antennas

Antenna Theory by Balanas

RTL-SDR / SDR Sharp (now Airspy)

Derek and Chris were hanging out at FOSDEM

Though CERN obviously has a very intricate front end, the LHC only outputs roughly 40Gb/s. This is the equivalent of one SDR.

Open BTS - an open source implementation of a cell phone tower

Range networks

The main view of GNU Radio Companion (GRS) is the flow graph

Web SDR applications

Former guest Mike Ossmann did a bunch of SDR tutorials.

Digital vs analog modes

On-off keying is like what garage door openers do in infrared

Frequency Shift Keying (FSK) is bouncing between frequencies. Common ones are 1200 Hz, 2200 Hz (usually shifted up to different carrier frequencies)

APRS network

(Forward) error correction

Digital video broadcast is already possible and happens in some cases in the amateur world. Better examples are the recent SpaceX launch and their perfect feeds back to earth.

Ettus USRP1

GNU radio adoption is rising in both the for profit and non profit space.

Derek is now an officer for the GNU radio project and his boss Martin Braun is the community leader.

This is where Chris got the idea for a Manufacturing group for KiCad. Interested? Sign up for the mailing list here.

Club Mate (blech). But if you really like it there may be an open source version on the way.

Framework where you can drop your code into the FPGA (because it's open source). Check that out, as well as the schematics for much of the hardware at files.ettus.com

Osmocom

Conference for GNUradio - Sept 17-21 in Henderson (LasVegas). You can see the schedule from last year.

The EISCat project is doing "Radar for the clouds" (among other things). Read more about them here, here and here.

GNUzilla

Beam steering/forming is used broadly in that project (but is a base physical idea). Watch a demo of it here. This is an implementation of MIMO.

Vector library of optomized kernels (VOLK)

GPUs, custom ASIC, FPGAs

Receiving satellites

Open Satellite project

AIS - airplane tracking 1.09 GHz

Decoding LoRa (GR LoRa...and...GR LoRa). This was done by Matt Knight of Bastille, his talk was mentioned a few times from CCC.

Reducing the learning curve

Where to learn more about GNUradio

Main site

Wiki / Tutorials

Discuss Mailing List

Slack channel

IRC

Find Derek online

On twitter! @derekkozel

IRC

Talks

HDDG

Links to other talks/slides

...more

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By The Amp Hour (Chris Gammell and David L Jones)

4.9

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