[Discuss-gnuradio] Introduction.

[Lamar Owen]

Good Morning.

We at PARI have purchased a USRP for radio astronomy purposes.

I spent the better part of two days getting all the prerequisites installed on 
my CentOS 4 laptop; whew, there are some doozies!  The worst was wxPython; 
nowhere in the wiki that I could find the version required.  I had built the 
CVS version; the release of 2.5 changed things a little.  I had built 
wxPython 2.4; found after reading in the source dist for gr-wxgui that it 
needed 2.5, and built that.  I can provide RPMs for the packages that lend 
themselves to RPMs, and might even consider packaging GNUradio proper as RPM.

My qualifications for doing that are the five years I spent maintaining the 
RPM's for PostgreSQL.

The whole single-precision fftw was also kindof a bear, and will break the 
next time yum pulls down an update.  That's a little too fragile for my 
liking.

However, I'm excited to be working towards this; our technical director, 
Charles Osborne, has been active on the SARA list about these things, and I 
decided to go ahead and join the list here (makes three dozen and one lists 
now) to see how things develop.

We plan on developing full-bore spectroscopy frontends, both local GUI and Web 
GUI, as well as RPC-type remote spectrometers (like, putting a USRP and a 
small low-power PC in the feedbox of one of our 26m telescopes and sending 
the data down GigE over fiber).

Now to save up and get a USRP for myself (ARS callsign KF4MYT).
-- 
Lamar Owen
Director of Information Technology
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC  28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu