Course Outline
Course consists of many lab sessions and each lab is built on Jupyter Notebook.
| Lab Title | Lab Description |
|---|---|
| Lab DSP | GNU Radio will be introduced. It will be leveraged to generate mono/stereo sound, make filtering on generated sound. Sound card will be utilized to learn fundamental DSP concepts like sampling rate, aliasing, filtering (FIR, cutoff frequency, transient range, taps), decimation. |
| Lab SDR | SDR hardware used throughout the labs is introduced: RTL-SDR. General purpose SDR applications SDR# on Windows and gqrx on Linux/Mac are explored to receive samples from RTL-SDR. Spectrum monitoring (live and waterfall), demodulation examples are illustrated with the application. |
| Lab Python | In this lab we will take a look at important Python libraries like numpy, scipy, and matplotlib. We'll see how to use them inside Jupyter Notebook interactive environment. |
| Lab AM | IQ record containing airband (108-137 MHz) signal will be used to demodulate Amplitude Modulated signal. IQ file formats will be discussed, too. |
| Lab NBFM | NBFM is commonly used in handheld communicaiton equipment. After FM repeater concept is presented, example FM repeater IQ record is used to show Narrow Band FM modulation. |
| Lab WBFM | WBFM signal may contain more than one signal: mono, stereo, sub-channels, HD, and a data channel. Flow-graphs are created to demodulate WBFM signals in GNU Radio. Mono/stereo sound, single/multi channel, real-time demodulation examples will be presented. |
| Lab Digital | Digital signal transmitted from simple keyfob device will be shown. We will use GNU Radio to understand how digital communication takes place with an end-to-end QPSK tutorial . |
| Lab ADS-B | ADS-B signals generated by aircrafts will be inspected. Planes will emit tail number, flight, altitude, direction and speed information through ADS-B signals. |
As you complete the labs, you will be able to:
- Understand core concepts in communication systems like sampling theorem, bandwidth, frequency bands, modulation types
- Use SDR to explore signals around
- Have an idea behind general purpose SDR applications
- Know how IQ data is stored and parsed
- Apply signal processing in Python in order to demodulate both analog and digital signals
- Gather knowledge on how communication systems work by experiments. Interesting signals from airband communication, FM repeaters, wideband FM broadcast, garage door openers will be analyzed and decoded.