SDR on Fedora
This page is dedicated to furthering the development of SDR or software-defined-radio on Fedora. Currently, Fedora supports several of the major SDR platforms including HackRF and RTL-SDR. Other platforms may be supported, however these are the only two that been tested and confirmed to work. Below you will find instructions for installing GNU-Radio and the required drivers for your SDR platforms so that you can get on the air with Fedora as quickly as possible!
What is SDR?
SDR is physical radio-hardware that is controllable by digital-signal-processing software. Traditionally, an SDR is an analog-to-digital-converter (ADC) that is directly interfaced to a computer. The computer then samples the ADC a certain amount of times per second and passes the data it receives on to an audio decoder, waterfall plot, histogram, or any other program designed to handle digital-signals. This enables fast deployment of extremely-broadband radio systems with relative ease.
GNU Radio
From the GNU Radio "Overview" page:
"GNU Radio is a free software development toolkit that provides the signal processing runtime and processing blocks to implement software radios using readily-available, low-cost external RF hardware and commodity processors. It is widely used in hobbyist, academic and commercial environments to support wireless communications research as well as to implement real-world radio systems.
GNU Radio applications are primarily written using the Python programming language, while the supplied, performance-critical signal processing path is implemented in C++ using processor floating point extensions where available. Thus, the developer is able to implement real-time, high-throughput radio systems in a simple-to-use, rapid-application-development environment."