SDR FM Demodulation Application

Authors: Adam Thompson (NVIDIA)
Supported platforms: x86_64
Last modified: March 18, 2025
Language: Python
Latest version: 1.0
Minimum Holoscan SDK version: 0.4.0
Tested Holoscan SDK versions: 0.4.0
Contribution metric: Level 2 - Trusted

As the "Hello World" application of software defined radio developers, this demonstration highlights real-time FM demodulation, resampling, and playback on GPU with NVIDIA's Holoscan SDK. In this example, we are using an inexpensive USB-based RTL-SDR dongle to feed complex valued Radio Frequency (RF) samples into GPU memory and use cuSignal functions to perform the relevant signal processing. The main objectives of this demonstration are to: - Highlight developer productivity in building an end-to-end streaming application with Holoscan and existing GPU-Accelerated Python libraries - Demonstrate how to construct and connect isolated units of work via Holoscan operators - Emphasize that operators created for this application can be re-used in other ones doing similar tasks

Running the Application

Prior to running the application, the user needs to install the necessary dependencies (and, of course, plug in a SDR into your computer). This is most easily done in an Anaconda environment.

conda create --name holoscan-sdr-demo python=3.8
conda activate holoscan-sdr-demo
conda install -c conda-forge -c rapidsai -c nvidia cusignal soapysdr soapysdr-module-rtlsdr pyaudio
pip install holoscan

The FM demodulation example can then be run via

python applications/sdr_fm_demodulation/sdr_fm_demodulation.py