Programme

13:00 - 13:20 Michael Hartje DK5HH, Markus Heller, DL8RDS, Jean-Michel Friedt, and Hervé Boeglen: Introduction

13:20 - 13:50 Antonio Costanzo, Valeria Loscri: Full duplex Visible Light Communication Platform based on GNU Radio and USRP

In this work, we implement a full duplex Visible Light Communication (VLC) based on USRP platform and GNU radio environment. The system is composed of a main downlink channel between a VLC transmitter and a VLC receiver, for which we have implemented a Pulse Position Modulation technique with different index. A feedback channel between the VLC receiver and the VLC transmitter is also developed, based on two Arduino 1. This feedback channel is used for sending control messages from the receiver, that can be used for the implementation of adaptive techniques, such as the dynamic change of the modulation based on the receiver state.

Antonio Costanzo is a member of INRIA Lille Nord Europe (France), as postdoc at Future Ubiquitous Network (FUN) team. His main interests are optical systems, antennas, applied electromagnetism, RF design and remote sensing. His present activities mainly deal with prototyping, development and test of Visible Light Communication Systems for IoT applications.

Valeria Loscrì is a permanent researcher in the FUN Team at Inria Lille–Nord Europe since Oct. 2013. From Dec. 2006 to Sept. 2013, she was Research Fellow in the TITAN Lab of the University of Calabria, Italy. She received her MSc and PhD degrees in Computer Science in 2003 and 2007, respectively, from the University of Calabria and her HDR (Habilitation à diriger des recherches) in 2018 from Université de Lille (France). Her research interests focus on emerging technologies for new communication paradigms such as Visible Light Communication, mmWave, TeraHertz bandwidth, cooperation and coexistence of wireless heterogeneous devices and cybersecurity in wireless communications. She has been involved in the activity of several European Projects (H2020 CyberSANE, FP7 EU project VITAL, the FP6 EU project MASCOT, etc.), Italian and French projects. She is in the editorial board of IEEE COMST, Elsevier ComNet, JNCA, IEEE Trans. on Nanobioscience. Since 2019, she is Scientific International Delegate for Inria Lille–Nord Europe.

13:50 - 14:35 Michael Hartje DK5HH: Digital Filters for SDR – a short view on Hogenauer filters

After a short overview of digital filters and a focus on LTI systems, some open source design tools for creating digital filters are mentioned. These can directly generate code for C or VHDL. With this, an important threshold for the first use of digital filters in SDR systems is crossed. Multirate filters are an important feature in SDR systems. E. Hogenauer has reported about an effective realization for the first time. This forms an important stage in SDR application in FPGA today. The paper also shows how the properties of sinc filters can be combined by means of downstream FIR filters to achieve a nearly ideal passband and blocking behavior.

Dr. Michael Hartje is professor for electrical Engineering at Hochschule Bremen, Germany. In addition to his work in the field of insulating materials, electrical power transmission and measurement technology, he founded the Software Defined Radio Academy as a conference event for the first time in 2014 together with Markus Heller and has been the scientific conference chairman since then. As a hobby, he is involved with various SDR projects and their application in amateur radio. The SDR system and many parts of the analysis of the DARC-ENAMS are based on his designs and realization. The WSPR equipment in the German Antarctic station Neumayer III was essentially designed by him.

14:35 - 14:50 Panel 1

Participants:

• Michael Hartje DK5HH
• Antonio Costanzo
• Hervé Boeglen
• Markus Heller DL8RDS

14:50 - 15:20 Henning Paul: Building a flexible Multi-Antenna-capable SDR using Open Source Technology

The availability of Open Source software components enables the ambitious hardware hacker to design their own powerful SDR. This talk is the follow-up to the talk on Scientific SDR and recapitulates the steps towards the current design of a Homebrew SDR based on a Xilinx Zynq SoC using the Linux kernel and other Open Source components. Furthermore, one of its applications, receiving shortwave radio with antenna diversity is presented.

Henning has been a hardware hacker since his childhood, but gained interest in wireless communication only during his Diploma and PhD studies in information technology at the University of Bremen. Having left academia for the industry a few years ago, Henning decided to intensify his free-time activities on Software Defined Radio and is currently waiting for his Amateur Radio Novice License examination to be finally able to transmit and not be restricted to receiving only.

15:20 - 15:50 Adrian Musceac YO8RZZ: A GNU/Linux multimode SDR transceiver application using GNU Radio and having VoIP functionality

NOTE: For technical reasons we were not able to stream this video. We are going to stream it tomorrown, Sunday June 27 at 12:30 hrs.

Using Qt and the GNU Radio C++ API I have developed a multimode SDR application which allowed me to experiment with various software defined radio hardware using digital and analog radio signals. Radio over IP and remote control functionality was also implemented using the Mumble VoIP protocol and umurmur (an open source minimalistic server for the Mumble protocol). The application was written to work on the GNU/Linux operating system and is compatible with USRP bus devices, ADALM-Pluto, LimeSDR or other devices supported by gr- osmosdr. The talk will give a short overview and brief descriptions of the functionality of the QRadioLink application.

Adrian Musceac is a Romanian amateur radio operator holding the callsign YO8RZZ and as a Linux software developer he has been interested in SDR ever since he discovered GNU Radio around 2007. These days most of his radio contacts are made using my own SDR application described in this talk, and he's here to share his experiences.

15:50 - 16:20 Clément Campo, Loïc Bernard, Hervé Boeglen, Sébastien Hengy, Jean-Marie Paillot: Transmitting phase-aligned signals for array steering with USRPs X310

The STC research group at ISL works on embedding sensors and telemetry electronics in 155mm gun-fired projectiles. The flexibility offered by SDR technology and its ever-decreasing production costs have made it a candidate for future embedded architectures. In this presentation, commercial USRPs X310s are used to steer transmitting antenna arrays. Capabilities and limitations of the commercial equipment with regard to phase-aligned applications are investigated and experimental results are shown.

Clément Campo (only speaker) was a PhD student for the French-German research Institute of Saint-Louis and the XLIM laboratory of Poitiers. He worked on developing an antenna weighting system based on commercial SDR, focusing on SDR, antenna array steering techniques and DOA estimation algorithms.

Loïc Bernard is a Professor of electronics engineering working at ISL on the electronics instrumentation of flying systems with very high dynamics. His research interests focus on antennas and antenna arrays, microwave circuits and metamaterials.

Hervé Boeglen is an Associate Professor at the university of Poitiers and a member of the XLIM laboratory. His current research interests include digital communications, wireless channel measurement and modelling, SDR and embedded systems for the IoT.

Sébastien Hengy received his PhD in signal, image, speech and telecommunication in Grenoble in 2005. He works at ISL as a researcher and his activities on array signal processing include continuous/transient sound source localization, sound source classification, and beamforming technologies.

J.-M. Paillot is dean of the Poitiers University Institute of Technology. He is also Full Professor of electronics engineering and member of the XLIM laboratory. He is presently interested in phase noise reduction techniques for microwave oscillators as well as in the research and development of circuits to command antenna arrays.

16:20 - 16:35 Panel 2

Participants:

• Michael Hartje DK5HH
• Clément Campo
• Adrian Musceac YO8RZZ
• Henning Paul
• Leonardo Cardoso
• Markus Heller DL8RDS

16:35 - 17:05 Barry Duggan KV4FV: Understanding ZMQ Blocks

"Understanding ZMQ Blocks" presents the set of GNU Radio Source and Sink blocks which provide stream and message communications to other GNU Radio flowgraphs or to separate Python programs. Use of the blocks is shown for various system architectures.

Barry Duggan is a graduate of Georgia Tech in Electrical Engineering and is a career computer programmer specializing in real-time control and data communication systems. He has been an amateur radio operator since 1953, and now devotes most of his time to the GNU Radio project. He is a member of the GNU Radio General Assembly and is currently the Documentation Lead.

17:05 - 17:35 Amaury Paris, Leonardo Cardoso, Jean Marie Gorce: Dynamic LoRa PHY layer for MAC experimentation using FIT/CorteXlab testbed

In this paper we present a complete GNU Radio, dynamic and customizable physical (PHY) layer for long range(LoRa) transceiver, usable with the FIT/CorteX lab radio test bed and derived from the original EPFL LoRa implementation. The created adaptation, through a standardized interface, allows end-users an easy connection to an external medium access control (MAC)/upper layer to experiment scenarios in a fully reproducible and isolated environment.It also provides several PHY layer key performance indicators and metrics such as signal to noise ratio (SNR), received signal energy, binary error rate (BER) and other, that can be used to gauge the performance of the ongoing communications as well as construct MAC layers able to use this information.Finally, the interface allows our plug&play PHY solution to be used with any existing or newly adapted MAC layer,without having to implement it in GNU Radio. This will be demonstrated during our presentation.

Amaury Paris is a research telecommunication engineer working for INRIA in the Citi laboratory at INSA de Lyon. After developing an interest in SDR during his studies, he is now working with the FIT/CorteXlab tested to extend experimentation capabilities for IoT wireless communications on PHY and MAC layer.

17:35 - 18:05 Jean Michel Friedt, Evariste Courjaud F5OEO: gr-rpitx: general purpose SDR emitter using the Raspberry Pi internal phase locked loop

GNU Radio, the Raspberry Pi single board computer and Digital Video Broadcast Terrestrial receivers make an awesome combination for educational purposes of Software Defined Radio. gr-rpitx aims at complementing these tools with emitting capabilities, combined with the flexibility of GNU Radio.

Jean-Michel Friedt is associate professor at University of Franche Comte in France, trained as a physicist but avid computer science and radiofrequency enthusiast, with software defined radio at the intersection of all these topics. SDR has slowly creeped from hobby to full time job for time and frequency metrology instrumentation, including GPS spoofing and spoofing cancellation or distributed radar systems. His teaching ephasizes the experimental demonstration using GNU Radio.

Evariste Courjaud has his callsign F5OEO since 1995. He is an electronics and computer science engineer. He is more interested in experimenting with radio rather than communicating on radio and his main interests reside on SDR, embedded platforms (Raspberry Pi) and digital television (DVB).

18:05 - 18:20 Panel 3

Participants:

• Michael Hartje DK5HH
• Jean Michel Friedt
• Amaury Paris
• Barry Duggan KV4FV
• Leonardo Cardoso
• Markus Heller DL8RDS

18:20 - 18:30 Break

18:30 - 19:30 Barry Duggan KV4FV, Derek Kozel AG6PO, Daniel Estévez EA4GPZ, Josh Morman: GNURadio Amateur Radio Group Meeting

• new GNU Radio releases - Derek
• new SDR support - Josh * gr-soapy * gr-iio
• SETI/ATA - Derek
• gr-satellites - Dani
• getting started in GNU Radio - Barry
• tutorials on modulation methods for hams - Barry

Barry Duggan is a graduate of Georgia Tech in Electrical Engineering and is a career computer programmer specializing in real-time control and data communication systems. He has been an amateur radio operator since 1953, and now devotes most of his time to the GNU Radio project. He is a member of the GNU Radio General Assembly and is currently the Documentation Lead.

Daniel Estévez got his Amateur radio license in 2014. He is passionate about everything having to do with radio and space. He is the author of gr-satellites, a GNU Radio out-of-tree module to decode Amateur satellites, and collaborates with the Allen Telescope Array as part of the GNU Radio team. He has a PhD in mathematics and works in satellite navigation.

12:30 - 13:00 Adrian Musceac YO8RZZ: A GNU/Linux multimode SDR transceiver application using GNU Radio and having VoIP functionality

Using Qt and the GNU Radio C++ API I have developed a multimode SDR application which allowed me to experiment with various software defined radio hardware using digital and analog radio signals. Radio over IP and remote control functionality was also implemented using the Mumble VoIP protocol and umurmur (an open source minimalistic server for the Mumble protocol). The application was written to work on the GNU/Linux operating system and is compatible with USRP bus devices, ADALM-Pluto, LimeSDR or other devices supported by gr- osmosdr. The talk will give a short overview and brief descriptions of the functionality of the QRadioLink application.

Adrian Musceac is a Romanian amateur radio operator holding the callsign YO8RZZ and as a Linux software developer he has been interested in SDR ever since he discovered GNU Radio around 2007. These days most of his radio contacts are made using my own SDR application described in this talk, and he's here to share his experiences.

13:00 - 13:30 Sreeraj Radjendran: Large scale spectrum monitoring: the role of machine learning

In this half-hour talk, the need for large scale wireless spectrum monitoring will be discussed. A short introduction to a large scale wireless spectrum monitoring framework, Electrosense, will be given. Furthermore, how anomaly detection and signal classification can be performed using the collected data will also be discussed. Insights to the major problems with state-of-the-art machine learning models will also be discussed in this context.

Sreeraj joined the EluciDATA Lab, Sirris (elucidata.be) in June 2021. As a data scientist, he is involved in industrial R&D projects enabling machine learning based solutions addressing the needs of the Belgian industry. Before joining Sirris, Sreeraj was a postdoctoral researcher in KU Leuven. He obtained his PhD degree from KU Leuven in Electrical Engineering. He is a FOSS enthusiast and has a few years of experience in industry as a digital signal processing engineer in the telecommunications sector.

13:30 - 14:00 Stefan Scholl DC9ST: Classification of shortwave radio signals with deep learning

Automatic mode classification of radio signals in the HF band is a valueable tool for band monitoring, operation of rare transmission modes and future applications of cognitive radio. In recent years, machine learning has established as a general and very powerful approach to classification problems. The presentation first provides an introduction to neural networks and deep learning. Then neural nets are applied to the task of radio signal classification. The result is an experimental deep convolutional neural net (CNN), that can distinguish between 18 different transmission modes occurring in the HF band, such as AM, SSB, Morse, RTTY, Olivia, etc.

Stefan Scholl holds a PhD in communications engineering and microelectronics. He is currently working as a researcher at Fraunhofer in the domain of radar technologies and he is interested in signal processing and hardware for software defined radios.

14:00 - 14:30 Bart Somers PE1RIK: Frequency Band Occupancy Measurements with statistical analysis

The goal of Frequency Band Occupancy (FBO) measurements is to investigate and monitor usage of dedicated piece of spectrum, in order to display usage over time. In this talk we present a method for Frequency Band Occupancy measurements and we analyse the results in a statistical way. This makes patterns of usage visible. The key factors in this method are high sensitivity and sort timeframes to trigger on, while still seeing small bandwidth modes. The method presented is usable for small to large frequency bands depending on the SDR used. As an example, the 2 meter HAM-band is monitored using and RTL-SDR with interesting results. The software is created with GNURadio and a new Specmon-block is written for this project. The postprocessing is done with Python and Gnuplot.

Bart got his HAMradio licence in 1996. A few years ago when cheap SDR-receivers came available on the market he switched from HF to learning SDR and GNUradio. He loves to combine Raspberry pi's, SDR's, antenna's and programming in Python. Currently he is taking his Msc in Computer Science at the University College of Dublin.

14:30 - 15:00 Marcus Leech : Mapping the sky at 21cm: Gnuradio and Radio Astronomy

We show the results of a year-long sky survey at the 21cm hydrogen line, producing an intensity map of the sky covering a declination range from -35 to +75DEG. We discuss the software tools used, Gnu Radio signal flows, and the hardware aspects of the instrument.

Marcus has been involved in high technology development since 1979, and has had an interest in Radio Astronomy since high-school. He worked in various roles at Nortel for nearly 20 years, and was involved in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for 14 years, having held roles as both working group chair, and Area Director for the Security Area. He began applying SDR techniques in Radio Astronomy in 2004, and has been a user and contributor to Gnu Radio since 2005. In 2016, Marcus created the Canadian Centre for Experimental Radio Astronomy to provide practical tools and techniques for small-scale Radio Astronomy programs in Universities, Colleges, and Secondary schools. CCERA has an active and diverse observing program.

15:00 - 15:20 Panel 4

Participants:

• Michael Hartje DK5HH
• Jean Michel Friedt
• Markus Heller DL8RDS
• Marcus Leech
• Bart Somers PE1RIK
• Stefan Scholl DC9ST
• Sreeraj Radjendran

15:20 - 16:20 Luca Pfüller, Christian Huber: DCF77

In this presentation the DCF77-signal is recived, demodulated and evaluated. It contains a hardwarepart, the conception and the setup of an active and selective ferritantenna, and a mixer with a appropriate filter. The output of the mixer gets sampled by an external soundcard and processed with a software receiver. The phase-modulation of the DCF77-signal is used, because it is less failure-prone than the amplitude-modulation. To sample the Signal with the soundcard, which has a samplerate of 48kHz, the signal was converted to 15kHz with a mixer. For this purpose, a tayloe-mixer is used to generate an I/Q signal. The reciver is set up symmetrically to suppress disturbances from the near environment. With the software the signal is frequency shifted to the baseband, filterd, crosscorrelated with a pseudo random noise code, interpretated and evaluated.

Luca Pfüller is 21 years old, student of Electronical Engeneering and Information Technology at UniBwMünchen, Germany since 2018. He is doing his master studies in Transmission Security.

Christian Huber is a student of Electronical Engeneering and Information Technology at UniBwMünchen. He is also doing his master studies in Transmission Security.

16:20 - 16:50 Henning Paul: Bridging the Gap Between Scientific SDR and Amateur Radio

While Software Defined Radio has actively been used in the scientific community for more than 2 decades for the purpose of evaluation and demonstration of novel communication techniques, it has become the interest of hobbyists and radio amateurs only 10 years ago. This talk will present different hardware demonstrators that have been developed in the author's university institute, their hardware concepts and exemplary results that have been obtained through those.

Henning has been a hardware hacker since his childhood, but gained interest in wireless communication only during his Diploma and PhD studies in information technology at the University of Bremen. Having left academia for the industry a few years ago, Henning decided to intensify his free-time activities on Software Defined Radio and is currently waiting for his Amateur Radio Novice License examination to be finally able to transmit and not be restricted to receiving only.

16:50 - 17:20 Erwin Serle PE3ES: RedPitaya for a different purpose: Modern Lab Measurement Equipment that can also be used as a Software Defined Radio. The RedPitaya STEMLab and SDRlab: not only for WSPR and FT8

Since 2015 the Red Pitaya board has offered an interesting reprogrammable test & measurement instrument. With various pieces of free software it can also be used as a capable Software Defined Radio. The so called SDRlab 122.88/16 is a variant of the original 125/14 Red Pitaya. In this presentation we will look into some of the details of these versions and show how both are used as a professional SDR platform.

Erwin Serle is a Dutch radioamateur with callsign PE3ES. Born in 1961, studied Technical Physics at the University of Delft, had a variety of functions with industrial and services organisations. He now lives in the department Meuse in the north-eastern part of France. His special interests are digital signal processing and SDR. He is a member of the IARU Region 1 EMC committee, a voluntary admin for the wsprnet.org website and writes articles for the magazines FUNKAMATEUR and VERON Electron.

17:20 - 17:40 Panel 5: Conclusion

Participants:

• Michael Hartje DK5HH
• Jean Michel Friedt
• Markus Heller DL8RDS
• Erwin Serle PE3ES / F4VTQ
• Henning Paul
• Christian Huber
• Luca Pfüller