By Marcus Müller | February 23, 2026
Enjoying Some Publicity
You’ll find GNU Radio being featured in thousands of scientific publications, you can find it featured in books, university curricula, space, on railroad tracks and dedicated conferences on at least three continents.
But frankly, I’ve been missing the time where I could venture out on the internet and just find someone just writing something about GNU Radio out of the sheer fun of bringing new concepts to people who would otherwise have missed a whole world of such things.
SOURCE Magazine
A magazine where exactly that happens is SOURCE, published by concretedog (also going by Jo Hinchliffe) for the sole purpose of spreading his joy about open source engineering software to the masses.
Thus, it was of great satisfaction to hear he’s done a bit on GNU Radio! Jo and I run into each other roughly once or twice a year; GNU Radio and FreeCAD are often booth neighbors at FOSDEM, and he’s strong on FreeCAD’s outreach.
Importance of Outreach and Building Your Own Birdhouse™
The author points out he’s basically walked the beginner’s tutorials, and gave what he found his own spin, and added explanations for concepts like frequency that might not be working vocabulary for just anybody.
Now, that’s especially noteworthy because it reminds me of the fact that not everybody who would benefit from knowing things comes in contact with software from the same background, with which either the math, the radio technology or the data flow aspects (or any combination thereof) are “easy” to begin with.
Special shoutout to our Docs team, who’s been making sure that beginners have something like our Tutorials to read – it makes a huge difference to the project and the contributors we see. Jo’s now an unexpecting contributor (sorry, Jo) to making GNU Radio accessible, and that would probably been a less fun ride to read along if the tutorials did not exist.
Now, clearly, this is also a shoutout to concretedog, for not only taking our sets of nails, hammers and boards to start and build his own birdhouse – but to also actually write about it. We could generally use more of that¹!
What I Want You To Do
Obviously, go and download SOURCE Issue 4, read it – and maybe tip the author/editor/publisher/coffee runner in residence so he isn’t as much worse off for spending the time. Maybe even give him a thank you!, e.g. on Mastodon.
The other thing I want is of course that you give feedback, like he did. He went out and wrote an awesome article – you don’t have to take it that far. We’d occassionally would love to hear what you’re actually using GNU Radio for: Having an actual understanding of the community is paramount for knowing where to spend resources (of which we have far too little to do everything!).
¹ If you feel the subtext here is “I have a zine/blog/vlog/puppetry troupe that tells people about what I’m doing with GNU Radio, I might want to ask whether it could be featured on www.gnuradio.org,” you caught my drift.