Use of GNU Radio as a Validation and Visualization Tool in Communications Electronic Support Project

Software Defined Radio (SDR) aims to implement components once implemented on hardware like mixer, filter, amplifier, modulator/demodulator, detector on general purpose processor or embedded platforms. We can examine SDR components under two parts, hardware and software. RF front end is the hardware part where analog signal processing occurs, that is analog signal is converted to digital signal and vice versa via ADC/DAC. Software, the other part runs on general purpose processor, digital signal processor, FPGA or heteregenous computational unit and it is responsible for digital signal processing. In this work, we use Aselsan receivers as the hardware component and GNU Radio as the software component that together make up SDR. Thanks to built-in signal processing blocks in GNU Radio, we can test and validate both receiver and firmware components easily and rapidly. GNU Radio can also be utilized as a graphical user interface by means of builtin visualization blocks.