I have just woken up after a nice long afternoon sleep. I really needed it I can tell you, and I was only woken up with a phonecall from a client.

Lets see… Time to describe more of the conference. One of the talks was on ‘Passive Radar’. GNUradio programmer Eric Bloom is working on a way to track aircraft using multiple recievers using TV transmitters and the like to do the tracking. The cool bit about this project is that it should be able to pick up the stealth bomber and stealth figher. Eric actually lives near area 51, giving a large number of aircraft to track.

Matt Ettus, also from the GNUradio project described his USRP board which allows you to cheaply digitize the radio spectrum and get it into the computer for the use of GNUradio. This hardware can be used to create a transmitter and receiver. It was cute seing one of these boards transmitting about 16 different CB type voice channels, and the other board receiving all 16 at once.

The other interesting thing is that this hardware also allows you to receive HDTV signals in the USA, and totally ignore the ‘Broadcast Flag’ that might say that a HDTV signal cannot be recorded or something…

Anyway I will describe more of the conference later…