Community

Contacting the Community

GNU Radio is not a corporation, or a corporate project: We’re a community project. Hence, we very much live by talking to each other!

The GNU Radio project can be reached

  • via Email using the GNU Radio discussion mailing list discuss-gnuradio@gnu.org, to which you can sign up here,
  • via Matrix on our Matrix homeserver (chat.gnuradio.org), e.g. using a public Matrix instance like matrix.org.

Contributing without Writing Code

The GNU Radio community has many motivated programmers – but often, we find ourselves in need of help keeping focus, and velocity, on the non-coding side of things:

Foremost, you can help by being an active member of the community: Join the mailing list and/or the chat, and ask, and discuss!

  • You can help by filing issues on github. Please don’t use that to ask usage questions – that’s what the contact methods above are for!
  • Read the official “GNU Radio Academy” tutorials and tell us what was good – and what wasn’t.
  • We host the GNU Radio Wiki. A wiki is a website that everyone can edit! You can help there by
    • Fixing whenever you find a typo, or a factual error!
    • Adding information, or short examples, to the blocks you’ve been using in the official Block documentation.
  • Give a talk, or advocate for GNU Radio, at your company, university, radio club or wherever you’d be found!
    • We have the annual GNU Radio conference, where you can submit technical talks, of course, centered around GNU Radio, but also adjacent fields: We’ve seen talks about radio education, radio astronomy, communication through the strangest media, …. All of them were worthwhile to be held at GRCon.
    • There’s the European GNU Radio days, and these are just as great!
    • If you’re coming in from the ham radio side, the SDR Academy is a great place to talk!
  • We’re also accepting feature requests on the issue tracker - make sure to use the feature request template, and be as clear as possible! A good feature request not only tells us what you want GNU Radio to do, but also how it helps the community. If possible, sketch things well enough for us to immediately understand what is meant!

We also have a lot of other community functions that we struggle to fill well. For example, if you’re planning on participating in GRCon, abd don’t mind helping out there, please do get in touch; we might even have some small task beforehand, which we can’t stem ourselves, making something big possible.

If you’re already an experienced GNU Radio user, and have an idea for a project that a student could do that would benefit the overall GNU Radio community, our Google Summer of Code engagement would be worth contributing to – by volunteering to become a mentor.

Contributing by Writing Code

  • The github bug tracker is ripe with bugs that need fixing – find one, fix it! Sometimes we have entries marked as “good first issue”, but that doesn’t mean we’d not be happy about any kind of bug fix.
  • Review pull requests, and comment on them. This is as important as writing code and submitting pull requests, as the hours spent reviewing code our done by a group of people that’s smaller than the group of people submitting code!
  • Package things: If you know there’s a project (for example, an out-of-tree module) that would benefit from being packaged for your package manager of choice, or if the GNU Radio package on that can be improved, do it. We’ll always have an open ear for such endeavours – reach out!
  • Make an addition to GNU Radio: Whether it’s a bug fix, or a feature that you think has an audience that is a significant part of the GNU Radio community, do not be frightened to upstream it! If in doubt, even and especially before you even start working on things, the mailing list and chat room has helpful minds.

You’ll really want to read the contributer’s guidelines.

Contributing Financially

GNU Radio’s financial organisation happens through the SETI Institute, which in the US is a 501(c)(3) charity (that means your donations might be tax deductible). If you want to:

Donate

Donations help pay infrastructure bills, give us financial stability allowing us to plan GRCon more robustly, and pay for the small things such as stickers.