Greetings everyone. Welcome to my first blog post covering my road test of the BeagleBone Black single board computer, and the DVB-T Stick Software Defined Radio.
I should probably start by introducing myself. My name is William, and I'm a senior software engineer for Art & Logic, a custom software development outsourcing company based in California. I work from my home in Prince Edward Island, on the east coast of Canada. I've been interested in computers and radio most of my life and have been a licensed amateur radio operator since 1977.
I was very pleased to be selected for this road test and am excited to start with my project using the BeagleBone Black (BBB) and the software defined radio (SDR) module.
The focus of my road test is to create a local RF source catalog. This will catalog all stationary RF sources for a given frequency range, within reception of my location. In addition to the frequency, and received signal strength of each RF source, data on transmission schedule patterns as well as direction to source information would be collected. From this data, a map will be constructed displaying each radio source based on direction and implied distance from the receiving station based on relative received signal strength.
Over the next 4 or 5 weeks, I will be posting regular updates on my progress. I will attempt to provide you with details on the steps I take along the way. This should give you the ability to replicate my project on your own, and to perhaps take it in new directions.
Much of the effort in this road test will be focused on software to control the SDR, and capture and store the data gathered during the project.
I will be starting with the powerful and somewhat daunting GnuRadio software package. This is probably the most widely used and highly flexible software available for controlling software defined radio systems. It comes with a number of individual source code modules which can be combined to create a vast array of SDR behaviours. There will be it of a challenge for me, since this modules are written in Python. While I am fluent in a number of computer languages, C, C++, Java, C#, VB.NET etc, I've only just dabbled a bit in Python, so there will be a bit of a learning curve there.
So.. please stay tuned as I'm sure we are in for a fun time experimenting with this combination of components.
