What is a Software Defined Radio? THIS PAGE UNDER CONSTRUCTION
A software-defined radio system, or SDR, is a radio communication system where components that have been typically implemented in hardware (e.g. mixers, filters, amplifiers, modulators/demodulators, detectors, etc.) are instead implemented by means of software on a personal computer or embedded computing devices. While the concept of SDR is not new, the rapidly evolving capabilities of digital electronics render practical many processes which used to be only theoretically possible.
A basic SDR system may consist of a personal computer equipped with a sound card, or other analog-to-digital converter, preceded by some form of RF front end. Significant amounts of signal processing are handed over to the general-purpose processor, rather than being done in special-purpose hardware. Such a design produces a radio which can receive and transmit widely different radio protocols (sometimes referred to as a waveforms) based solely on the software used.
Software radios have significant utility for the military and cell phone services, both of which must serve a wide variety of changing radio protocols in real time.
In the long term, software-defined radios are expected by proponents like the SDRForum (now The Wireless Innovation Forum) to become the dominant technology in radio communications. SDRs, along with software defined antennas are the enablers of the cognitive radio.
- A software-defined radio can be flexible enough to avoid the "limited spectrum" assumptions of designers of previous kinds of radios, in one or more ways including:
- spread spectrum and ultra-wideband techniques allow several transmitters to transmit in the same place on the same frequency with very little interference, typically combined with one or more error detection and correction techniques to fix all the errors caused by that interference.
- software defined antennas adaptively "lock onto" a directional signal, so that receivers can better reject interference from other directions, allowing it to detect fainter transmissions.
- cognitive radio techniques: each radio measures the spectrum in use and communicates that information to other cooperating radios, and then transmitters avoid frequencies currently in use by licensed transmitters or are otherwise unusable, and shift transmissions to "empty" frequencies.
- dynamic transmitter power adjustment, based on information communicated from the receivers, lowering transmit power to the minimum necessary, reducing the near-far problem and reducing interference to others.
- wireless mesh network where every added radio increase total capacity and reduces the power required at any one node. Each node only transmits loud enough for the message to hop to the nearest node in that direction, reducing near-far problem and reducing interference to others.
The ideal receiver scheme would be to attach an analog-to-digital converter to an antenna. A digital signal processor would read the converter, and then its software would transform the stream of data from the converter to any other form the application requires.
An ideal transmitter would be similar. A digital signal processor would generate a stream of numbers. These would be sent to a digital-to-analog converter connected to a radio antenna.
The ideal scheme is not completely realizable due to the actual limits of the technology. The main problem in both directions is the difficulty of conversion between the digital and the analog domains at a high enough rate and a high enough accuracy at the same time, and without relying upon physical processes like interference and electromagnetic resonance for assistance.
Most receivers use a variable-frequency oscillator, mixer, and filter to tune the desired signal to a common intermediate frequency or baseband, where it is then sampled by the analog-to-digital converter. However, in some applications it is not necessary to tune the signal to an intermediate frequency and the radio frequency signal is directly sampled by the analog-to-digital converter (after amplification).
Real analog-to-digital converters lack the dynamic range to pick up sub-microvolt, nanowatt-power radio signals. Therefore a low-noise amplifier must precede the conversion step and this device introduces its own problems. For example, if spurious signals are present (which is typical), these compete with the desired signals within the amplifier's dynamic range. They may introduce distortion in the desired signals, or may block them completely. The standard solution is to put band-pass filters between the antenna and the amplifier, but these reduce the radio's flexibility - which some see as the whole point of a software radio. Real software radios often have two or three analog channel filters with different bandwidths that are switched in and out.
The term 'software radio' was coined in 1984 by a team at the Garland Texas Division of E-Systems Inc. (now Raytheon). A classified, yet fairly well known, 'Software Radio Proof-of-Concept' laboratory was developed at E-Systems that popularized Software Radio within various government agencies. This 1984 Software Radio was a digital baseband receiver that provided programmable interference cancellation and demodulation for broadband signals, typically with thousands of adaptive filter taps, using multiple array processors accessing shared memory.
Perhaps the first software-defined radio transceiver was designed and implemented by Peter Hoeher and Helmuth Lang at the German Aerospace Research Establishment (DLR, formerly DFVLR) in Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany, in 1988. Both transmitter and receiver of an adaptive digital satellite modem were implemented according to the principles of software-defined radio, and a flexible hardware periphery was proposed.
The term "Software Defined Radio" was coined in 1991 by Joseph Mitola, who published the first paper on the topic in 1992. Though the concept was first proposed in 1991, software-defined radios have their origins in the defense sector since the late 1970s in both the U.S. and Europe (for example, Walter Tuttlebee described a VLF radio that used an ADC and an 8085 microprocessor). One of the first public software radio initiatives was a U.S. military project named SpeakEasy. The primary goal of the SpeakEasy project was to use programmable processing to emulate more than 10 existing military radios, operating in frequency bands between 2 and 2000 MHz. Further, another design goal was to be able to easily incorporate new coding and modulation standards in the future, so that military communications can keep pace with advances in coding and modulation techniques.
Amateur and home use
A typical amateur software radio uses a direct conversion receiver. Unlike direct conversion receivers of the more distant past, the mixer technologies used are based on the quadrature sampling detector and the quadrature sampling exciter.
The receiver performance of this line of SDRs is directly related to the dynamic range of the analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) utilized. Radio frequency signals are down converted to the audio frequency band, which is sampled by a high performance audio frequency ADC. First generation SDRs used a PC sound card to provide ADC functionality. The newer software defined radios use embedded high performance ADCs that provide higher dynamic range and are more resistant to noise and RF interference.
A fast PC performs the digital signal processing (DSP) operations using software specific for the radio hardware. Several software radio efforts use the open source SDR library DttSP.
The SDR software performs all of the demodulation, filtering (both radio frequency and audio frequency), signal enhancement (equalization and binaural presentation). Uses include every common amateur modulation: morse code, single sideband modulation, frequency modulation, amplitude modulation, and a variety of digital modes such as radioteletype, slow-scan television, and packet radio. Amateurs also experiment with new modulation methods: for instance, the DREAM open-source project decodes the COFDM technique used by Digital Radio Mondiale.
More recently, the GNU Radio using primarily the Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) uses a USB 2.0 interface, an FPGA, and a high-speed set of analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters, combined with reconfigurable free software. Its sampling and synthesis bandwidth is a thousand times that of PC sound cards, which enables wideband operation.
The HPSDR (High Performance Software Defined Radio) project uses a 16-bit 135 MSPS analog-to-digital converter that provides performance over the range 0 to 55 MHz comparable to that of a conventional analogue HF radio. The receiver will also operate in the VHF and UHF range using either mixer image or alias responses. Interface to a PC is provided by a USB 2.0 interface though Ethernet could be used as well. The project is modular and comprises a backplane onto which other boards plug in. This allows experimentation with new techniques and devices without the need to replace the entire set of boards. An exciter provides 1/2 W of RF over the same range or into the VHF and UHF range using image or alias outputs.