Communication & spectrum challengesDARPA’s Software Defined Radio (SDR) Hackfest explores solutions for spectrum challenges

Published 22 December 2017

The DARPA Bay Area Software Defined Radio (SDR) Hackfest came to a close on Friday, 17 November at the NASA Ames Conference Center in Moffett Field, California. During the weeklong event, over 150 members of the SDR community came together to discuss, innovate, and ideate around the future of software radio technology and its potential to address challenging communications issues that are emerging due to the increasingly congested electromagnetic (EM) spectrum and the proliferation of wireless-enabled devices.

The DARPA Bay Area Software Defined Radio (SDR) Hackfest came to a close on Friday, 17 November at the NASA Ames Conference Center in Moffett Field, California. During the weeklong event, over 150 members of the SDR community came together to discuss, innovate, and ideate around the future of software radio technology and its potential to address challenging communications issues that are emerging due to the increasingly congested electromagnetic (EM) spectrum and the proliferation of wireless-enabled devices.

“The DARPA SDR Hackfest was created to engage a growing community of SDR developers and enthusiasts from a diverse range of backgrounds and I believe we accomplished that mission,” said Tom Rondeau, a program manager in DARPA’s Microsystems Technology Office (MTO), who led the event. “The Hackfest provided community members with a place to interact with experts and explore new ideas around the potential for the technology, and our speaker series at the event challenged attendees to contemplate everything from the trajectory of the UAV industry to the challenges we must address to ensure the free and open sharing of software.”

DARPA notes that throughout the Hackfest, eight pre-qualified teams from academia, industry, and the hacker- and makerspace-communities worked together to develop solutions to specific “Hackfest Missions.” Presented to the teams on the first day of the event, the three Missions amounted to problem sets designed to examine how SDR could be used to solve communications, computing, and control challenges at the still-uncharted intersections of cyber and physical technologies. Each Mission focused on the communications link between ground stations and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones. These links are susceptible to breaking due to interference, EM congestion, or other communications issues. In developing the Missions, DARPA’s Hackfest organizers consulted with groups of military operators to ensure that various real-world scenarios involving radio and UAV technologies would be included. As such, it is possible that some of the solutions to these communications challenges that emerged during the event could progress toward real-work applications.