Software defined radio: Part 22 in a series of tutorials on instrumentation and measurement

A software defined radio (SDR) is a communication system that performs many of its required signal processing tasks in a programmable digital signal processing (DSP) engine. The engine is coupled to the air interface of analog circuits and antennae by analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters (ADCs and DACs). The SDR's software reprograms the DSP segment of the radio's physical layer to reconFigure the radio system parameters and can thus synthesize multiple radios. The software can also select and alter the air interface components as well as the higher level data processing layers of the radio system.