Software Defined Community Radio Using Low Cost Hardware and Free Software

Community radio is the third model of radio broadcasting besides the commercial and public systems. It aims to provide individuals with local news and information that are important to a small community. This paper presents a new software defined radio approach to implementing community radio using Raspberry Pi, GNURadio, USB RTL ? SDR sticks, and Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP). The main goal is to define and demonstrate a low cost, flexible transmitter and receiver using cost effective devices such as Raspberry PI computer, RTL-SDR dongle and USRP.