Prototyping with GNU radio and the USRP - where to begin

In compliance with FCC regulations and in response to factors such as cost and consumer demand, many devices are engineered such that they can only receive or transmit in a specific mode of operation or in a fixed range of frequencies. This is the state of many radio peripherals, tuners, and television sets. It is naturally of interest to consider devices that can receive a variety of communications modes or waveforms. Fortunately, software defined radio (SDR) technology enables many waveforms to be processed by a single hardware platform by simply changing its programming. This paper discusses several applications that can be implemented using an open source software (OSS) digital signal processing (DSP) library and the universal software radio peripheral that was developed with GNU radio.