LabView USRP workshop

Last Tuesday a workshop on radio transmission and receiving took place, jointly organized by DARE and National Instruments. The workshop took place in the Korolev lab in the EWI building of the TU Delft.

National Instruments is a worldwide leading company on the area of data acquisition and mechatronics. Measurement equipment developed by them can be found in laboratories all over the world and their LabView program is a standard to control experimental setups.

The course that they organised together with DARE at the TU Delft was centred on the usage of a USRP. This stands for “Universal Software Radio Peripheral” and is in essence a piece of hardware that allows you to set up your own radio transmission link when you hook it up to your computer.

National Instruments USRP

In the workshop the participants were first introduced to working with LabView and the basic knowledge to understand radio communication. After that there was some hands on experience where the USRP’s that were available were first used to receive a FM-radio station. Using the LabView program the USRP was set to listen to a specific frequency, to sample within a specific bandwidth, to apply a gain and to finally output the radio station to the speakers. After this some more advanced topics were treated and the session concluded with the participants sending each other text messages through a RF connection.

The session was attended by twelve TU Delft associates, most of them were associated directly with DARE or with the Delfi-N3xt satellite project of the TU Delft.

National Instruments is a supplier of the Stratos II project and supports the development with expertise and hardware for the development of the transmission system on-board Stratos II and the ground station for Stratos.

Receiving FM Radio through the USRP.