What’s going to be the next big thing in wireless technology? My bet is software-defined radio, and thanks to a piece of hardware called the Universal Software Radio Peripheral, or USRP, you can get right to the bleeding edge today.

Currently, adding an audio, video, or data stream to a radio signal so it can be broadcast—a process known as modulation—is nearly always done by dedicated electronics. The same is true with the reverse process—demodulation—required to receive a transmission. Radio waves can be modulated in any number of ways, and each way requires different circuitry. This is why you can’t, say, use a TV designed for the U.S. NTSC broadcast standard and expect it to work in Europe, which uses mostly the PAL standard.

The idea behind software-defined radio is to do all that modulation and demodulation with software instead of with dedicated circuitry. The most obvious benefit is that instead of having to build extra circuitry to handle different types of radio signals, you can just load an appropriate program. One moment your computer could be an AM radio, the next a wireless data transceiver—and then perhaps a TV set. Or you could leverage the flexibility of software to do things that are difficult, if not impossible, with traditional radio setups. Want to broadcast an emergency message on every FM band? Scan a dozen walkie-talkie channels at once? Or design and test a new wireless data protocol? No problem with the software radio.

Researchers are currently using software radio–based systems to help them work on problems in realms that include radio astronomy, telecommunications, and medical imaging. Already a number of commercial products rely on software radio.

While software radio is still very much a work in progress, and ­general-­purpose processors still lack the computing power to fulfill all the dreams of enthusiasts, you can get a taste of the future with the USRP. The hardware works in concert with free software developed by the GNU Radio project, an international collaboration of programmers who donate their time and skills.

The USRP acts as an RF front end for a computer running the GNU Radio software, converting radio waves picked up by an antenna into digital copies that the computer software can handle or, conversely, converting a wave synthesized by the computer into a radio transmission. I tested GNU Radio and the USRP together on both Linux and Mac OS X computers, but the GNU Radio software will also work with other RF front ends, and it can be used with prerecorded signal samples in the absence of any radio hardware. Likewise, the USRP can be used with proprietary software such as Matlab and LabView, or with home-brewed code.

The USRP is made by Ettus Research, in Mountain View, Calif., and costs US $550 for the basic motherboard. This square motherboard, 16 centimeters on a side, houses a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) to do heavy-duty signal processing, as well as the circuitry required for talking with a Mac or PC via a USB 2.0 connection.

The motherboard has four expansion ports—two for receiving radio signals and two for transmitting signals. Various daughterboards sold separately by Ettus Research are plugged into these ports; different daughterboards handle different frequency ranges, giving the USRP an overall potential range of 0 hertz to 2.9 gigahertz, which covers everything from AM radio, through FM and television, to beyond Wi-Fi.

Daughterboards sell for $75 to $275 each; a typical example would be the TVRX, which can receive signals in the 50- to 870-megahertz range and sells for $100. The USRP is not restricted to tuning in one frequency at a time, because it can handle signals as wide as 16 MHz. The architecture also supports MIMO—multiple input, multiple output of simultaneous radio signals—which is the underlying technical approach behind next-generation wireless data and cellphone standards.

The USRP is clearly a labor of love for Matt Ettus, the man behind Ettus Research, and the motherboard and daughterboards are an engineer’s delight. Plenty of interconnects for hardware hackers are provided, and detailed schematics, along with the Verilog code that configures the FPGA, can be downloaded from the Ettus Research Web site at http://www.ettus.com.

Ettus also sells a number of antennas and cables, and the company supplied me with a general-purpose antenna optimized for 900 MHz to 2.6 GHz. And maybe it’s just me, but make sure you add cables to your purchase: Most of the USRP daughterboards use SMA-F connectors for hooking up antennas, and it turned out to be surprisingly difficult to find a local retailer who could sell me a suitable cable [see ”The Back Story” in this issue].