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GNU Radio

GNU Radio is a free software development toolkit that provides signal processing blocks to implement software-defined radios and signal processing systems. It can be used with external radio frequency (RF) hardware to create software-defined radios, or without hardware in a simulation-like environment. It is widely used in hobbyist, academic, and commercial environments to support both wireless communications research and real-world radio systems.

The GNU Radio software provides the framework and tools to build and run software radio or just general signal-processing applications. The GNU Radio applications themselves are generally known as "flowgraphs", which are a series of signal processing blocks connected together, thus describing a data flow.

As with all software-defined radio systems, reconfigurability is a key feature. Instead of using different radios designed for specific but disparate purposes, a single, general-purpose, radio can be used as the radio front-end, and the signal-processing software (here, GNU Radio), handles the processing specific to the radio application.

These flowgraphs can be written in either C++ or Python. The GNU Radio infrastructure is written entirely in C++, and many of the user tools (such as GNU Radio Companion) are written in Python. Flowgraphs can also be constructed in the GNU Radio Companion GUI.

GNU Radio is a signal processing package and part of the GNU Project. It is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL), and most of the project code is copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation.

First published in 2001, GNU Radio is an official GNU package. Philanthropist John Gilmore initiated GNU Radio with the funding of $320,000 (US) to Eric Blossom for code creation and project-management duties. One of the first applications was building an ATSC receiver in software.

The GNU Radio software began as a fork of the Pspectra code that was developed by the SpectrumWare project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 2004, a complete rewrite of GNU Radio was completed, so today GNU Radio no longer has any original Pspectra code.

Matt Ettus joined the project as one of the first developers, and created the Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) to provide a hardware platform for use with the GNU Radio software. In 2004, Matt founded Ettus Research LLC and began selling USRPs that worked with GNU Radio.

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