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Digital RF

The Digital RF project encompasses a standardized HDF5 format for reading and writing of radio frequency data and the software for doing so. The format is designed to be self-documenting for data archive and to allow rapid random access for data processing. For details on the format, refer to the 'documents' directory in the source tree.

This suite of software includes libraries for reading and writing data in the Digital RF HDF5 format in C (libdigital_rf) and Python (digital_rf), with optional interfaces for GNU Radio (gr_drf) and MATLAB. It also contains the thor UHD radio recorder script, Python tools for managing and processing Digital RF data, example scripts that demonstrate basic usage, and example applications that encompass a complete data recording and processing chain for various use cases.

Important Links

Official source code repo: https://github.com/MITHaystack/digital_rf

Issue tracker: https://github.com/MITHaystack/digital_rf/issues

User mailing list for help/questions: openradar-users@openradar.org

Developer mailing list: openradar-developers@openradar.org

Installation

Conda is by far the easiest method to use Digital RF and is recommended.

conda

Install digital_rf using our Conda binary package. It's best to create a separate Conda environment for digital_rf due to the long list of dependences and need for Python 2.7, which is increasingly hard to use with package as fundamental as Numpy:

conda create -n digrf python=2.7
. activate digrf

conda config --add channels ryanvolz
conda config --add channels conda-forge
conda install digital_rf

Using source code package

First, ensure that you have the above-listed dependencies installed. On macOS the dependencies can be installed through macports.

Clone the repository and enter the source directory:

git clone https://github.com/MITHaystack/digital_rf.git
cd digital_rf/build

Build and install:

cmake ..
make
sudo make install

Finally, you will probably then need to update the library cache so the newly-installed libdigital_rf is found:

sudo ldconfig

The above commands will build the gr_drf module for GNU Radio if GNU Radio is found on the system. To disable gr_drf manually, set the 'ENABLE_GNURADIO' option to 'OFF' when invoking cmake:

cmake -DENABLE_GNURADIO=OFF ..

Dependencies

Build:

  • hdf5 >= 1.8 (libhdf5-dev)
  • python == 2.7 (python-dev)
  • numpy (python-numpy)
  • cmake (cmake)

Additional optional build dependencies:

  • gnuradio (gnuradio-dev) [gnuradio]
  • boost (libboost-dev) [gnuradio]
  • swig (swig) [gnuradio]

Runtime:

  • h5py (python-h5py)
  • hdf5 >= 1.8 (libhdf5)
  • python == 2.7 (python)
  • numpy (python-numpy)

Additional optional runtime dependencies:

  • watchdog (python-watchdog) [watchdog]
  • gnuradio (gnuradio) [gnuradio]
  • gr-uhd (libgnuradio-uhd) [thor]
  • pytz (python-tz) [thor]
  • dateutil (python-dateutil) [thor]
  • python-sounddevice (pip install sounddevice) [drf_sound]

Usage

Python and C examples can be found in the examples directory in the source tree. The C examples can be compiled from the build directory by running:

make examples

The following Python commands will load and read data located in a directory '/data/test'.

Load the module and create a reader object:

import digital_rf as drf
do = drf.DigitalRFReader('/data/test')

List channels:

do.get_channels()

Get data bounds for channel 'cha':

s, e = do.get_bounds('cha')

Read first 10 samples from channel 'cha':

data = do.read_vector(s, 10, 'cha')

Testing

To execute the C test suite, run the following from the build directory:

make test

The python tests found in the tests directory in the source tree can be run directly after digital_rf has been installed.

Both the C and python tests create test files in '/tmp/hdf5*'. To cleanup afterward, run:

rm -r /tmp/hdf5*

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under the Geospace Facilities and MRI programs, and by National Instruments / Ettus corporation through the donation of software radio hardware. We are grateful for the support that made this development possible.