From this Saturday, a lot of the CTVR EN team will be making their way to Chicago for IEEE DySPAN 2008. I’m arriving on Saturday to meet with Dr. Tom and to get the demonstrations all set up and ready to go. We have what looks like a great few days ahead and the equipment is beginning to arrive at the hotel. A valuable lesson learned from last year was to make sure that heavy-duty AC mains circuits are available. Thankfully, the hotel has that in hand. Anritsu is our very generous test & analysis equipment sponsor again this year.

Tom and I will be reporting via DySPAN on Twitter, the DySPAN Facebook group and the EN YouTube channel in addition to some live blogging here hopefully.

We have a FAQ for demonstrators on the IEEE DySPAN 2008 demonstrations page with all the latest information.

My talk on software-defined and cognitive radio in the IET HQ at Savoy Place, London is available as a webcast. Note: the rest of the talks are available here including presentations by Hiroshi Harada, William Webb, Andrew Stirling (White Space Coalition), Klaus Moessner, Julie Bradford and Peter Olanders (ETSI)

Looking back at this, I think I may have coined a few new ‘terms’ too. The theme was ‘experimentation and real-world understanding is required to really progress with cognitive radio and dynamic spectrum access technologies’. A quick overview of the DySPAN demonstrations story is included as part of this. Let me preface this by saying, if you have listened to 50 different interpretations of what cognitive radio is over the past few months, you might have a similar viewpoint to me at the start of this.

IET have a lot of really good presentations from other seminars available; well worth browsing through them.

Research and Development efforts in Software-Defined Radio (SDR)Cognitive Radio (CR) and Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) Technologies Keith Nolan Ph.D. Presentation from Savoy Place, London, UK 2008-09-18 12:00:00.0 Communications Channel >> go to webcast

Part I of Dr. Bob McGwier’s highly interesting talk is available to download from here

Bob’s great presentation was a two-hour whirlwind tour through software-defined radio and cognitive radio, focusing on GNU radio in Part I. For those of you were there at the talk, the attached slides don’t do full justice to Bob’s engaging presentation style and sidebars. Part II of Bob’s talk (AMSAT and amateur radio) will be available here when I get it.

Tom and Dr. Robert McGwier are in town next week. If you will be in the area, you are very welcome to attend the following presentation:

Dr. Robert McGwier N4HY from the Center for Communications Research in Princeton, N.J. USA
Friday September 26th, 2008 at 2.30pm
Lloyd Institute LB01 lecture theatre
Trinity College Dublin
Dublin 2
Rep. of Ireland

Bob is a highly-engaging speaker and is currently working on the AMSAT Eagle project on several software-defined radio transponders, the AMSAT-DL Phase 3 Express Project where he ported the programming language IPS to a 32 bit architecture for the on-board computer and will author the software-defined radio for low speed telecommand on the upcoming projects AMSAT-DL. Bob is currently the AMSAT Vice President for Engineering. He is also the chairman of the ARRL Software-Defined Radio Working Group and a member of the High Speed Multimedia working group.

He was a designer and builder on the AMSAT Microsat’s and participated in the Amsat-Oscar 13 and Amsat-Oscar 40 projects. For his work on the AMSAT and TAPR projects, he was awarded the Dayton Hamvention Technical Excellence award in 1990 and the Central States VHF Society John T. Chambers Award in 2007. He is coauthor of the software-defined radio (SDR) core, DttSP and has applied it to government projects and Flex Radio. He is a regular contributor to GnuRadio.

Bob has a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Brown University. His thesis, “Regular Perturbations and Nonlinear Filtering” sprang from his interest in phase-locked loops and range-rate orbit determination. Well known as N4HY, he has been an amateur radio operator since 1964. Bob was the co-founder of the AMSAT-TAPR DSP project with Tom Clark, K3IO (previously W3IWI) in 1987.

In addition to his many endeavors Bob finds time to be an active member of ARRL, AMSAT, AMSAT-DL, TAPR, PACKRATS, and the Frankford Radio Club. Bob is happy to be a volunteer software contributor to the exciting radio projects for DttSP, GnuRadio, and AMSAT. Shann McGwier, Bob’s wife, is N2HPE and they have three children. He is currently employed by the Center for Communications Research in Princeton, N.J.

Bob’s presentation will cover his software-defined radio, networking, and AMSAT work.

All are welcome.

IEEE DySPAN 2008 had a commercial competition for the first time this year. The idea was to create a 1 minute commercial about DySPAN for a prize of a free student registration. The winner is Przemek Pawelczak, a Ph.D. candidate from TU Delft, the Netherlands. Here’s his video:

I was invited to speak at the Institution of Engineering and Technology’s seminar on cognitive radio and software-defined radio: technologies and techniques. This will be held in the IET’s HQ at Savoy Place in London on Thursday September 18. If you plan on being there, why not get in touch; I’d be delighted to meet you.

My talk will be about the ongoing efforts worldwide to prototype cognitive radio and dynamic spectrum access ideas, and increase the current understanding of the challenges and value of these new technologies through experimentation. A preview of the upcoming DySPAN demos will feature as part of this.

The full programme contains the schedule of talks and posters. Hope to meet you there.

A ‘DySPAN 2008 Demonstration Pack’ is now available to download for free from the demonstrations webpage on http://www.ieee-dyspan.com. This pack comprises a Matlab script and over 4000 measurements spanning the 400MHz-500MHz band captured in the Knickerbocker Hotel, Chicago during March when Tom and I visited (the Knickerbocker Hotel is where IEEE DySPAN 2008 will be held).

The Matlab script generates a 3D plot of the a subset of the measurement trace files but more importantly, it gives demonstrators and indeed other researchers a starting point to test their dynamic spectrum access systems using real and relevant measurement information. The traces can be used to drive detection and decision engines and will hopefully cut down the time taken to get up and running when the demonstrations sessions begin in October.

This 3D plot was generated using the supplied Matlab script and just 500 of the over 4000 measurement traces available in the download. Needless to say, there’s quite a lot of activity in this band in the Chicago area. Adjacent to the DySPAN demonstration frequencies (see below), a number of TV and intermittent high-power signals can be spotted. One particular short-duration high-power narrowband signal can be observed at approximately 474MHz.

Details of our FCC special temporary authority (STA) licence that allows IEEE DySPAN 2008 demonstrators to use 482MHz-500MHz for cognitive radio and dynamic spectrum access systems can also be found on the updated demonstrations page.

Hicham, Paul, and I travelled to the first OpenCoffee Club BBQ, a spin-off of the highly successful OpenCoffee Club network, which was held in Terryglass, Tipperary on the 16th. This was an informal meeting of entrepreneurs, tech people, start-ups, bloggers, twitters, investors, marketing people, with a programme combining talks, open discussions, and demonstrations. We heard about this at a very late stage but bundled a load of equipment in the car early that morning and headed down with the aim of setting up a demonstration and talking tech with people.

Terryglass is a picture postcard Irish village that you would almost drive by without realising. Thanks to the OCC organiser, Evert Bopp, the ‘Derg Inn’ (the local fine ale emporium) offers free WiFi and Wii tournaments along with a warm welcome.

The talks ranging from setting up a wireless ISP and making money from it and how the tides can affect network performance, as we found out afterwards, to distributed content and delivery systems, education and tech, web 2.0 and beyond, sparked some very interesting conversations. We set up an audio/video wireless link demo using our reconfigurable radio system in the pub across the road from where the main action was taking place and displayed the action using a LCD projector – not the usual thing seen in a pub I guess.

The programme also featured a ‘Dragons’ Den’ competition where contestants pitched their ideas to a panel (the dragons) for an array of prizes for the winner. I entered at the last minute without my laptop, slides, or demo since they were all in the pub, and although I didn’t come away with the top prize in the end, it proved to be a valuable opportunity to learn and spark off some interesting chats with those present afterwards at the BBQ down at the lakeside. Have a look at the photos by Will Knott.

Paul sailed through his Ph.D. defence – Congrats!!

I have published a brief summary of each of the demonstrations scheduled for the 2008 IEEE DySPAN conference in Chicago this October on the demonstrations webpage of the conference website at http://www.ieee-dyspan.com. There will be a good mix of dynamic spectrum access systems, cognitive radio and networks, policy-based systems, and TV whitespace detection at this year’s conference.