Vancouver Python User Group Reminder

[Paul Prescod]

Tuesday March 1st is the first Tuesday of the month and the Vancouver 
Python, Zope and Plone user's group will have its monthly meeting at 
ActiveState (580 Granville) at 7:00.

The topic is GNU Radio and Python.

GNU Radio is a free software implementation of Software Defined Radio.

"Imagine if the only thing stopping your handheld PDA from 
simultaneously being a GPS receiver, phone, radio or miniature TV was 
your willingness to download and install some free software program."

"We're pretty much turning all hardware problems into software 
problems," Blossom says. "We want to facilitate evolution in the radio 
arena."

"A software radio is a radio whose channel modulation waveforms are 
defined in software. That is, waveforms are generated as sampled digital 
signals, converted from digital to analog via a wideband DAC and then 
possibly upconverted from IF to RF. The receiver, similarly, employs a 
wideband Analog to Digital Converter (ADC) that captures all of the 
channels of the software radio node. The receiver then extracts, 
downconverts and demodulates the channel waveform using software on a 
general purpose processor."

GNU Radio is a hybrid C++ / Python system. The primitive signal 
processing blocks are implemented in C++. All graph construction, policy 
decisions and non-performance critical operations are performed in 
Python. All of the underlying runtime system is manipulatable from Python.

Upcoming talks:

April 5, 2005
     Large Scale Python