Discussing GNU Radio's Future

I want to take a moment to bring up the three wishes Jens E. posed
earlier:

  1. A properly designed digital receiver chain of some cool standard
    (e.g. DMB, DVB…)
    demonstrating the modularity and usability of GNU Radio.
  2. Usable, clean graphical sinks (a la Simulink) - fftsink is a quick
    hack.
  3. Documentation (for the average Joe, the source is not enough…).

These are great, and very much in line with what I have been thinking,
too. We have work being done on both the digital modulation and qtgui
to make them more usable, and both are a priority for the next
release.

Jens: when you are asking for a usable graphical sink, have you used
the qtgui modules? If so, do you have any criticisms of them? We’re
actively working on trying to get some of Mike C.’ fixes and
additions into the main GNU Radio tree. I also know that Josh has had
a good start in including the qtgui sinks into GRC.

Now, documentation is probably not forthcoming any time soon, sorry. I
hope we can start trickling things out, as I am trying to do (when I
find the time) in the examples on my GNU Radio website. But I agree,
we still need more. Various efforts in the past have created forms of
documentation, but as the project moves and matures, these documents
quickly get out of date. I would love to have an open style (tex or
docbook preferably) set of documents in GNU Radio itself such that we
can make changes and keep it up-to-date without any copyright
problems. Any help on this would be very very much appreciated.

Thanks!
Tom