Development of a Bench for Analyzing the Radio Station Operation in the APCO P25, DMR and TETRA Communication Standards Based on Broadband Software-Defined Radios and GNU Radio Software Toolkit

Abstract

The article discusses the development of an instrument complex (bench, stand) for the study of digital radio communication standards: APCO P25, DMR and TETRA, based on software-defined radio systems (SDR) technologies in voice mode. The bench is based on the HackRF One broadband SDR transceiver and the GNU Radio open software toolkit. Along with the SDR transceiver HackRF One, it is proposed to use the SDR TV tuner AstroMeta Digital TV Dongle as an available receiver. The structure of the hardware and software parts of the bench is proposed. The software implementation of listed digital radio communication standards is based on the open libraries of the Osmocom project: the BoadBot OP25 and TETRA Live Monitor libraries. The operating system Linux Debian 10 and the software toolkit GNU Radio 3.7 were used for practical testing of the bench functioning. The practical testing results of the developed bench are presented both when interacting in voice mode with radio stations of the specified radio communication standards, and between the SDR transmitter HackRF One and the SDR TV tuner AstroMeta Digital TV Dongle. For the radio communication standards APCO P25 and DMR, the receiving and transmission modes of the speech signal have been practically tested on the developed bench, and for the radio communication standard TETRA, the modes of scanning the radio broadcast and receiving the speech signal have been tested. As a bench operability confirmation for the listed radio communication standards, the screenshots of programs implementing the specified modes of interaction between the bench hardware components are given. The proposed bench architecture allows to expand the list of supported radio standards. The developed bench can be used: 1) for educational purposes in the study of radio communication standards; 2) in the development and debugging of radio communication systems under development; 3) for control testing during the release of radio systems.