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GNU Radio is a free software toolkit for learning about, building and deploying software-defined radios. Whereas GNU Radio 3.0 release is the first release from the new GNU 'build system.' Highlights include uniform handling of a variety of modulation and demodulation waveforms including GMSK, dBPSK and dQPSK. The new gr-trellis module provides general support for convolutional and turbo codes.

Eric Blossom, founder and overall architect of GNU Radio says the project is making a significant contribution to SDR right now. GNU Radio is being used in a variety of commercial, defense and academic projects.
Started in 1998, GNU Radio is an official GNU project. Philanthropist John Gilmore initiated GNU Radio with a funding of $320,000 to Eric Blossom for code creation and project management duties. Ongoing funding is provided by an assortment of government, commercial and private sources.

Today, GNU Radio is a real-time signal-processing package that is distributed under the terms of the GNU general public license. The goal is to create a world-class platform for building software radios — one in which the source code of the entire system is available to all users and developers.
As with all software-defined radio systems, reconfigurability is the key feature. Instead of purchasing multiple expensive radios, a single more generic radio is purchased, which feeds into powerful signal-processing software — GNU Radio, in this case. GNU Radio is currently supporting a wide variety of research and development in wireless networking, cognitive radio (SDR + AI/machine learning), geolocation and passive coherent location systems.

GNU Radio began as a fork of the Pspectra code that was developed by the SpectrumWare project at MIT. The Pspectra SDR design used a modular pipeline structure coded in C++. In 2004, a complete top-to-bottom rewrite of the GNU Radio was completed. The rewritten system is a hybrid of C++ for signal processing and Python for high-level leverage. It continues the data flow heritage and marries it with a message passing abstraction for control plane and packetized data support. Also, it is worth noting that the Pspectra codebase has been used as the foundation of the commercial Vanu software radio.

The GNU Radio project created the Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP), which is an affordable solution for getting the RF into and out of the computational fabric. The device features 4 64 MS/s A/Ds, 4 128 MS/s D/As and a variety of RF transceiver daughterboards covering interesting bands from 50 MHz to 2.9 GHz. The USRP was developed by Matt Ettus. http://gnuradio.org/trac/wiki.