[Discuss-gnuradio] Gnuradio DCS Module

[Martin Holst Swende]

Hi list,

I am pretty new to Gnuradio / SDR, experimenting with a HackRF. As a
startup experiment, I wanted to communicate with simple handheld radio
devices (toy radios). These radios used DCS, and in order for my
computer to bypass their squelch, I need to
1) Determine DCS-code
2) Add DCS to my transmissions

Since I didn't find any suitable tools for that (?), I have now
implemented a gnuradio module to decode DCS. The source code is at
bitbucket [1].

I started out by implementing the DCS decoder via a message block in
python. This seemed a bit hacky, so I decided to implement it in C++
instead following the "Out-of-tree modules" tutorial [2]. In the end, I
implemented it as a Stream Tag block. My thought was that it would add
tags to an audio stream, and a UI component somewhere would pick up the
tags and display to the user (needless to say, a DCS-squelch could be
built using the tagged stream).

I now have a few question, both regarding the digital signal processing
in general, and regarding gnuradio.

1. Currently, my block takes digital input. Here [3] you can see a
picture of how I go from 960 hz sampled audio stream via DC-blocker,
thresholding , interpolation and decimation into a digital signal (to
the 'old' message sink). In the next stage, I'd like to take an audio
source (with a few selectable common audion samplerates) instead, which
means that my block must do all those things within the block itself.
How is this normally done? Do I create a hierarchical block containing
these blocks "under the hood", plus my new digital-in-DCS-decode block?

2. Does it make sense to have DCS as a tagged stream? Should I chose
some other type to communicate DCS ?

3. Are there better ways to extract the digital signal from the audio
source than my schematic above? Am I doing something stupid?

4. Are there any suitable UI-components I can use to display DCS
information - e.g. something which show information from streamed tags ,
or mechanisms to modify variables based on tag info?

Grateful for suggestions and ideas.
Martin Holst Swende


[1] https://bitbucket.org/holiman/gnuradio-dcs
[2] http://gnuradio.org/redmine/projects/gnuradio/wiki/OutOfTreeModules
[3] http://martin.swende.se/graph_part.png