spench.net

San Francisco & Silicon Valley:

New York, New York:

SCOTSUXX:

The Software Defined Radio (SDR) I currently use is the Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) 1 made by Ettus Research (in a custom housing!):

I've used it for several of my projects, including an aviation tracking system and an ExtIO plugin for Winrad:

Here are some excerpts of the presentation Matt Robert and I gave at the October 2010 meetup of Dorkbot Sydney.

If you wish to see all of the photos from the set-up phase prior to the presentation on the roof of my apartment block, please have a look at the album in my gallery.

These are screenshots from the first working version of the system. You'll notice one obvious bug: some of the altitudes are impossibly high (the was an extra un-necessary bit shift).

If you wish to see photos of the first proper outdoor test of the system on top of the tallest hill in Sydney Park, please have a look at the album in my gallery.

This project is a completely home-grown implementation of an aircraft tracking system using Mode S messages received on a Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) from Ettus Research. The system comprises of a software-defined baseband decoder, a GUI front-end and a real-time (smooth) JavaScript-enabled Google Earth feed.

For the Mode S/aviation/RF enthusiast: If you are interested in various notes, diagrams and screenshots that are more technical than these series of pages, please check out the dedicated page on my wiki as well.

The AviationMapper desktop app

Live streaming JavaScript-based (not KML) feed in Google Earth

This experiment involved acquiring CellID and signal strength information from the GSM cellular network, tracking one's position while acquiring this data, and finally presenting it nicely. It is summarised in the following pictures (full details are described in the sub-sections found top-left):

Hardware:

Mapping position and signal strength measurements:

A system for distributed extensible particle simulations over multiple computers. Unfortunately I haven't exactly got around to distributing it. Although thanks to the generosity of Steven Foster, the many lab computers at my school are waiting. My report details the process and simulation design.