Philoradio

The PhiloRadio-Project tries to answer the question:
How can we realize a reliable real time software defined radio receiver on desktop computers?
At this software defined radio receiver means a radio receiver which mainly consists of software. Receiver specific hardware components are replaced by software. These software parts are mostly running on embedded systems using Field Programable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) or Digital Signal Processors (DSPs).
Processing on CPUs only is not common due to the huge amount of processing resources required. Most current CPUs are not able to handle this.
We present a different approach to realize SDR-receivers on desktop computers optimized for multi-core CPUs and already available General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit (GPGPU).

A software defined radio receiver requires a hardware interface between the antenna signal and the processing unit. With higher efficiency of the processing unit the complexity of the interface decreases. An ideal software radio consists of only an antenna, an A/D-converter and an e.g. PCI-interface [1].

For the work presented on this page we used an extended interface with an additional low-IF tuner and for a mobile solution the Universal  Software Radio Peripheral 2 (USRP2) from Ettus Research LLC [2].

[1]  Joseph Mitola III, Software Radio Architecture, Objec - Oriented Approaches to Wireless Systems Engineering. John Wiley & Sons Inc., 2000.

[2] www.ettus.com