The goal of this project is to extend the “SparSDR” toolset to make it more useful for passive wideband monitoring and discovery of communication.

Software Defined Radios (SDRs) have been used extensively in recent years to monitor radio communication. These devices can tune a wide range of frequencies (typically up to 6GHz) and can reach even wider frequencies with appropriate up/down-converters. However, their bandwidth is often limited by both the sample rate of the chip and the USB/ethernet link back to the main PC.

The SparSDR project aims to fix the latter of these problems, by using the onboard FPGA provided by some SDRs to perform onboard power triggering. This enables the SDR to monitor a wide bandwidth on a limited-rate backhaul, by only sending back the samples containing potentially meaningful data.

In this project we aim to extend the SparSDR project in the following ways:

  • Enable frequency sweeping to cover an even wider range of frequencies
  • Implement additional triggering methods, correlating on known message headers in addition to simple power triggering
  • Support a wider range of FPGA-equipped SDRs (the project currently supports the USRP N210 and ADALM PlutoSDR)
  • Improve usability, making the system easier to install and configure

This project will involve work with the following technologies:

  • SDRs, GNU Radio
  • FPGA development (Xilinx, Vivado)
  • High performance C++ Students taking on the project should be experienced with some of these areas, and able/willing to learn the others.

Recommended reading: