I have talked about the “origin story” for CE a few times in the past. If you’ve never read about it, the short version is that I was super frustrated with my signals class in college not showing why a mathematical technique is useful. Mike Ossmann (of Great Scott Gadgets) makes the HackRF. In this tutorial, you can see basically what I had hoped for in that class all those years ago. It’s a great real world example of signal processing applied to real things (radio signals). I don’t recommend you get the HackRF if you’re just starting out, but this is worth a watch even if you’re not using it:
That’s a great resource to have for SDR and signals in general. Michael Ossmann has a gift for making complicated subjects easier to understand.
If anyone is interested in working with signals in RF design, here’s another great video of his on RF circuit design he did at one of the Hackaday Superconference workshops:
Fun fact: I filmed this one!
Also: sorry for the crappy filming!
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