Suggested reading order

Hi,:

I’m a newbie to GNURadio/USRP, I have checked the suggested reading at
http://gnuradio.org/redmine/wiki/gnuradio/SuggestedReading, but there’re
a lot of material there, it would probably take a year to go through all
sections even if I just read one book from each section. I wonder if
every section is a must read or some can be skipped if I’m not going to
modify the hardware? Also is there an order by which I should go through
the different sections (for example Electronics first, then Radio and RF
Design, then …). I have strong background in software development, so
Programming/C++/Python should be no problem, but I know very little
about hardware/radio/communication/dsp.

Thanks

Jim

Hi, Tom:

Thank you for the suggestion, I’ll give it a try.

Thanks

Jim

On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 10:52 AM, Jim [email protected] wrote:

Programming/C++/Python should be no problem, but I know very little about
hardware/radio/communication/dsp.

Thanks

Jim

Hi Jim,
I haven’t spent much time thinking about this question before, and I
suspect from the lack of response to your query, not many others have,
either. The best I can tell you right now is to take the Wikipedia
approach. That is, find something to start with and move around when
you find something interesting or that needs more explanation.
Probably best to start with reading up on GNU Radio first and see what
doesn’t make sense, then try to fill in those holes first.

Tom

Hi, Kunal:

This is great advice, I was tempted to give the MIT course a try, now I
guess I’ll start with complextoreal tutorial, then Lyons and Proakis
books. Thank you very much!

Thanks

RJX

On Sun, Aug 15, 2010 at 8:46 PM, Kunal K.
[email protected] wrote:

“Understanding Digital Signal Processing” by Richard Lyons is a really
http://www.complextoreal.com/tutorial.htm website may be useful too.
to deal with techniques requiring advanced RF topics or antenna design
Hope this helps.

Kunal

Kunal,

This is really good. Would you be up for putting this on the Wiki page
for future reference?

Thanks!
Tom

Hi,

I’ll give it a shot. I studied DSP etc. in college, but have worked
mostly in pure software development, so I may be able to guess what
you need to focus on. This may be contentious advice, and I’ll defer
to anyone with differing views.

The following may be a good reading order for you:

  1. DSP - starting with the basics of signals & systems, sampling etc.
    “Understanding Digital Signal Processing” by Richard Lyons is a really
    good reference, but you can try starting off with the free online book
    at http://www.dspguide.com/, and see if that is enough for your needs.
    It’s been a while since I’ve read through either reference, but I
    remember they were both good, although the Lyons book is a classic.

  2. Digital Communications: DSP as applied to communications…
    modulation, demodulation, coding etc. Personally, I found the MIT
    course (“Principles of Digital Communications I” on OCW) way too
    theoretical, so you can skip that. Any of the books may be a really
    good reference, but I’ve only read Proakis. The
    http://www.complextoreal.com/tutorial.htm website may be useful too.

3.Software Radio in General - once you understand the previous two
sections, you’ll see that most signal processing can be implemented as
algorithms on a stream of numbers. The details of Software Radio may
then be intuitive to you as a programmer. So it may be enough to skim
through some of the briefer references in this section, and focus on
the GNU Radio docs / articles.

If you don’t need to mess with the FPGA or the hardware, you can
safely skip the Electronics and Verilog sections. If you don’t need
to deal with techniques requiring advanced RF topics or antenna design
(e.g. MIMO etc.), you can safely skip the Radio and RF design section,
although a skim of Wikipedia on the topic can’t hurt.

I think http://www.complextoreal.com/tutorial.htm may be a decent
starting point for both, DSP basics, and digital communications. I
haven’t gone through all the tutorials there yet, but I thought the
“Fourier Analysis Made Easy” tutorials were easy to read. Keep in
mind, I already had studied DSP previously, so it may not be as easy
for a complete beginner.

Hope this helps.

Kunal

On Sun, Aug 15, 2010 at 11:13 PM, Tom R. [email protected]
wrote:

Kunal,

This is really good. Would you be up for putting this on the Wiki page
for future reference?

Thanks!
Tom

Thanks, Tom! Sure, I think this may be useful to enough people to go
up on the wiki. I will clean it up and post it as soon as I can.

Since it’s written for programmer-specific background, I guess it
would be better if it’s posted as a separate page, rather than
changing the general SuggestedReading page itself. Maybe a
“SuggestedReadingOrder” of “IfYourBackgroundIsX” page, where others
can add advice for people coming from other backgrounds?

Kunal