Cory Doctorow mentions SDR in his 28c3 speech

(around the 23’45” mark)

You can’t just flip a switch on your baby monitor, and turn it into something that interferes with air traffic control signals. But powerful software-defined radios can change from baby monitor to emergency services dispatcher to air traffic controller just by loading and executing different software, which is why…

Video and transcript

 

WSR ’12

The 7th Karlsruhe Workshop on Software Radios will be held on March 7/8, 2012.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

• antennas,
• radio frontend architectures,
• analog to digital conversion,
• hardware and baseband processing,
• cognitive radio and cognitive networks,
• dynamic spectrum access,
• green radio communications,
• regulation and standards.

 

Cracking WPA and GSM

A couple of interesting articles on The Register:

Researcher cracks Wi-Fi passwords with Amazon cloud

Cellphone snooping now easier and cheaper than ever

 

 

Codec2 | An Open Source Low Rate Speech Codec

Codec2 is an open source (LGPL) speech codec aiming for 2000bit/second. It’s part of the FreeTel project.

References:

• http://www.rowetel.com/blog/?p=128
• http://www.rowetel.com/blog/?page_id=452

 

Safest programming languages

Ben Brosgol (of Adacore) is describing how C and C++ are unsafe for DO-178B programming due to the unpredictable behaviour of error-prone features. In the search for reliability and analysability, he examines MISRA C (and MISRA C++), Ada (with its Restrictions pragma and SPARK subset) and Java (with its Real Time Specification and Safety Critical Java).

He concludes that there is no perfect choice, and that subsetting is essential.

The article: http://www.vmecritical.com/articles/id/?4030

 

another post

A post about GNU Radio on the NewTechArticles blog: http://newtecharticles.blogspot.com/2010/05/gnu-radio-open-source-software-defined.html

 

DVB-T in the province of Varese

The correspondence of channels to frequencies is country-dependent. Here’s what it’s like in Italy:

• for VHF channels 5-12: f = 177.5MHz + 7MHz * (ch – 5)
• channels 5, 10, 11 and 12 are also called channels D, H, H1 and H2, respectively
• there’s also channels E (186MHz), F (194.5MHz) and G (203.5MHz)
• for UHF channels 21-69: f = 474MHz + 8MHz * (ch – 21)

The switch-over from analogue to digital happened 2 days ago (18.05), but I still receive two-thirds of the analogue channels…

In the meantime, I’m receiving DVB-T bouquets (MUXes) at channels 27, 28, 42 and 48 (i.e. 522MHz, 530MHz, 642MHz and 690MHz respectively).

Instead, on the PC using the USB DVB-T receiver Pinnacle PCTV nanostick 73e and me-tv or vlc:

• me-tv requires either a pre-saved channel/service list or a list of channels for your region/province. You can get the second by installing dvb-apps, which puts these files under /usr/share/vb/dvb-t
• you can have vlc scan all tv frequencies (not country-dependent) by running vlc dvb://

 

Microsoft is pushing forward with SORA

Now the name of Mitola is mentioned, too

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/collaboration/global/asia-pacific/programs/sora.aspx

 

list of SDR acronyms

Rather complete, might be useful: a list of SDR-related acronyms.

 

what was the question

Just read a very funny bullet in a presentation by Eric Blossom titled “An introduction to Software Radio (and a bit of GNU Radio & the USRP)”:

(regarding the SCA) “CORBA is the answer, what was the question?”