The radio coverage monitoring by low-cost system based on SDR

Abstract

The paper presents the design of a low-cost radio coverage monitoring system based on software defined radio. The main purpose of monitoring systems is real-time, low-cost measurement of coverage of radio signals in different environments. The monitoring systems are composed from a hardware and software part that is developed in the Matlab system. The main outputs from monitoring systems are a measured spectrum with computed characteristics. The software part includes a data viewer also developed in Matlab. The data viewer is used for projection of measured data in a base map, or received power in a timeline. The monitoring system was tested and evaluated. The measurements for different radio services (FM broadcast, 3G, LTE, DVB-T) are presented.