Grayver E. Implementing Software Defined Radio

New York: Springer Science+Business Media, 2013. — 271 p.SDR is now a mature field, but most books on the subject treat it as a new technology and approach SDR from a theoretical perspective. This book brings SDR down to earth by taking a very practical approach. The target audience is practicing engineers and graduate students using SDR as a tool rather than an end unto itself, as well as technical managers overseeing development of SDR. In general, SDR is a very practical field—there just isn’t very much theory that is unique to flexible radios versus single function radios. However, the devil is in the details… a designer of an SDR is faced with a myriad of choices and tradeoffs and may not be aware of many of them. In this book I cover, at least superficially, most of these choices. Entire books can be devoted to subjects treated in a few paragraphs below (e.g. wideband antennas). This book is written to be consulted at the start of an SDR development project to help the designers pin down the hardware architecture. Most of the architectures described below are based on actual radios developed by the author and his colleagues. Having built, debugged, and tested the different radios; I will highlight some of the non-obvious pitfalls and hopefully save the reader countless hours. One of my primary job responsibilities is oversight of SDR development by many government contractors. The lessons learned from dozens of successful and less than successful projects are sprinkled throughout this book, mostly in the footnotes.