Eric Blossom adapted MIT student Vanu Bose's "pspectra" (parallelized "spectra") software into the first GNU Radio software. That software used a PCI digitizer board, I believe from National Instruments, but it was expensive and not very flexible. We knew of much better digitizer chips, but there was no convenient way to integrate them into a PC-based system. Matt Ettus as working on a Bluetooth chip or macrocell at a commercial company at the time. He noticed the GNU Radio effort, and got interested in contributing. He and Eric designed the original USRP prototypes and modified the GNU Radio software to be able to talk with it over the USB bus. They also designed the daughterboard system and defined the electrical and physical connections to the daughterboards. They released the design under free licenses. Matt ultimately left his job (after finishing the Bluetooth design) and started Ettus Research to reliably produce the USRP, enabling low cost and high performance radio work with GNU Radio. It was a lot of work (he was a 1-man operation and it grew only slowly) and I'm glad he's been well rewarded over the long run for doing it.
John _______________________________________________ Discuss-gnuradio mailing list Discuss-gnuradio@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnuradio