Submitted for the Approval...

Two years of effort comes to a measure of fruition with the submission of the first draft of my senior honors thesis. It's not Master's level, but it's a start. It condenses just about everything I know about channel sounding and software radio into a few dozen pages of good old fashioned LaTeX.
Without further ado...
The thesis.

Read, comment, cite, criticize. The possibilities are endless.

A DIY Channel Sounder

In the spirit of my previous post, I present a recipe for building your own wideband channel sounder.
You will need:

2x USRP2's. http://www.ettus.com
2x USRP Daughterboards. Frequency of your choice (I use two RFX2400's).
2x Antennas to match your DBoard frequency (log periodics seem to work pretty well).
2x Beefy Laptops with GbE. I use Dell M6400's.
A GNURadio installation. http://gnuradio.org
Optionally, Octave or MATLAB, for data analysis.

The Ettus USRP2 has ADC's running at 100MHz. However, the GbE interface limits you to 25 megasamples per second, so this cuts your effective bandwidth to 25MHz. This is true on both transmit and receive.

***UPDATE***
Project code is now hosted  at http://sourceforge.net/projects/its-sounder/.

A Defense Teaser

Last Friday I gave a presentation on the work I'm doing with the Channel Sounder project over at ITS. The presentation was an abbreviated form of the actual defense, scheduled for April 2, 2010.