Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] dive into gnu-radio

[Martin Braun]

On 03/16/2016 01:33 PM, Martijn Moeling wrote:
> I feel there is a gap between the knowledge of the experts and the
> information for newcomers. My questions have been answered pretty
> quickly but the answers raise even more questions and confuse me.

This is a common concern, but it's really, really hard for us as a
community to address comprehensively. There's multiple reasons for that,
but it all comes down to the fact that writing good tutorials is hard.

Many of us core GNU Radio members have a DSP/Wireless background and
then moved into GNU Radio. For people like us, you need completely
different tutorials than for someone who's not familiar with DSP.

Now, there's lots of very good books out there that go into DSP and
wireless communication. They're usually written to address
university-level students. But how do we condense them into nice and
easy tutorials? It's hard.
It gets exacerbated by the fact that writing tutorials becomes harder
the more familiar you get with a topic. You lose sight of what's hard,
and what's not. Unless you're a professional tutorial writer, of course
-- but we have very few of those.

>> 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.

SO can be tough like that. Also, 'gnuradio' tagged questions don't
usually get a lot of attention. I'd be happy to see more action on SO,
but we never really got there.

Back to your list, 3) is comprehensively covered by the guided
tutorials, as are parts of 2) and 4). 1), however, is where we get into
the tricky scenario I went into above.


I'm afraid I don't have easy answers for you here. All I can say is I
hope people stay encouraged to submit documentation patches and
tutorials, to make this all more accessible. We certainly don't want
this to be available to only an elitist bunch of DSP nerds.

Cheers,
Martin