On the 28th and 29th of November, the REDS institute of the HEIG-VD organized its very first international conference at the Swiss Aéropôle of Payerne on the topic of Software Defined Radio, driven by the SDR Makerspace initiative. Needless to say, the conference was overall a success. I have met motivated and enthusiastic attendees, all gathering around the exciting topic of Software Defined Radios. Industrialists, academicians, experts, hobbyists, and even students were present.
As I said, the SDR Makerspace initiative was at the center of the event and many of the talks given there were related to it. This Makerspace is an activity that has been proposed and implemented by the Libre Space Foundation and is sponsored by the European Space Agency. It aims at bringing together “makers”, academic researchers, and software developers to develop open-source projects centered on Software Defined Radios applied to space communications, structuring each project as a small sub-activity. The REDS institute joined last year and since then works on some of the activities.
The conference was an opportunity for my colleagues and myself to share our experience on some of the SDR Makerspace activities we worked on. Kevin and Oscar presented and demoed their project, GR-DNN, a GNURadio module for DNN inference on Radio signals. As for me, I presented two activities on LDPC decoding in two space communication protocols : DVB-S2 and CCSDS.
I selected for you a few talks that represent the main topics of the conference. In the following video, you can watch Manolis Surligas presenting the SDR Makerspace concept :
Next, have a look at Bixio Rimoldi’s talk on the academic perspective around SDRs :
And finally, Alberto Dassatti talked about the “why and how” on Machine Learning applied in SDR :
Check out the rest of the conference material (videos and slides) on the SDR Makerspace’s website :
Finally, a recurrent question has been heard at the end of the event : “will you organize a second edition ?” Well, since we have had a very positive feedback from the attendees and from what I know, a new edition of the conference could happen in a year or two. So stay tuned !