#381 – An Interview with Derek Kozel

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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
  • Email
• Talks
  • HDDG
  • Links to other talks/slides