The software radio workshop will run for two days at ToorCon 11. It will be an introduction to digital signal processing, software radio and the powerful tools that enable the growing array of software radio projects within the hacker community.

Who should attend?

Anyone who has ever taken an interest wireless systems or signal processing. We plan to teach a mixture of digital signal processing and RF theory, using the GNU radio tools for demonstration and experimentation either individually or in groups.

What should I bring?

Laptop

There are no processing power or memory requirements but signal processing is an intensive application, so more of both is always useful. USB 2.0 (for USRP) or gigabit ethernet (for USRP2) are required for taking live samples.

Required Software

We'll be working with the GNU radio toolkit which is an open-source signal processing framework, whilst we'll have a copy of the source and dependencies it would save a lot of time if you had a working copy already installed. Version 3.2 is available from gnuradio.org or from yum/apt repositories. You should be running 3.2 or a more recent development version.

If building GNU radio from source, take a look at the build guide. The core gnuradio libraries are essential as is gnuradio companion (GRC). USRP and USRP2 support are strongly recommended. The fastest and easiest way to install 3.2 is with the binary packages for Ubuntu Jaunty (9.04). For other distributions you'll have to compile from source.

Optional Software

Another excellent tool is Baudline which can be used to analyse signals in the frequency domain. It is definitely worth having a copy.

We may use octave and/or scipy as well.

USRP(2)

We will be bringing some hardware to share, however if you have access to a USRP or USRP2 and could borrow it for the weekend then it would be great to bring it along.

USB pen drive

Not required but may be useful for swapping code and sample files if the network is problematic. Sample files get large, so >1Gb is useful.

Wireless devices

Anything with a radio that you think might be fun to work with. Older items tend to be easier to play with (less encryption, rolling codes, etc). Some example items are:

* Garage/car door remote controls

* Remote control toys

If you plan to bring anything please add it here (with operating frequency if known).