Hello,
This might be a discussion that you have faced multiple times, but please bear with me until the end of this email. (I know how busy guys approach emails coming from the mailing list).
I am a guy who recently got to know about gnu-radio, and it raised interest in me. To get into the topic, I followed the suggestions in the website and started from the guided tutorials:
https://gnuradio.org/redmine/projects/gnuradio/wiki/Tutorials. So far I managed to complete the tutorial series up to the C++ programming section.
Throughout the tutorials I managed to understand the basic concepts and terminology about gnu-radio. Also using the GRC is fine. Unfortunately, I am a computer scientists and I have little to no background in digital signal processing and electrical engineering. Hence, for me it is quite hard to figure out the purpose of the blocks. Of course, as a computer guy it is easy to follow the tutorials, because they basically show what changes to be done where, but the semantic behind those changes, as well as the semantic behind the arrangement of the blocks remains a mystery to me.
So far in my work I have dealt with topics related to the higher layers in computer networks, but now I want to play around with lower layers too. I am sure in the community there are guys who have similar background, and have to follow an inverse track -- from upper layers, downwards. What is some good starting point?
If you say the tutorials are, I will have to disagree, because I completed everything successfully, but if one asks me what happens in those modules, or what each block does, I would not be able to answer for my life. Besides, in the programming tutorials where one is taught how to create OOT things got even more complicated.
I don't want to be misunderstood, I am not saying the tutorials are bad. Obviously someone invested the time and effort to create them, but I fancy more the "learning by doing" way of tutorials. Those which include explicit tasks, starting from a minimal working example. The OMNeT++ TicToc tutorial is a very nice reference, or the Codecademy way of teaching.
To go back to the initial Q, what is the go-to approach for someone of CS background who wants to become efficient in gnu-radio. Books? Online material?
What I need is:
1) understand the blocks, their purpose and what they do
2) learn how to create a minimal scenario using grc
3) learn how to create blocks of my own
4) create more complicated scenario.
I wanted to ask the same question in stackoverflow, as I have seen people from the community hanging around there. But, the amount of shitstorm coming from there is amazing when asking about learning pointers... They mark the Q as "opinion-based" immediately.
Hope anyone has the nerves, time and courtesy to write back. I'm certain it will serve as a nice starting point to future enthusiasts.
Best,
Desmond