Re: GSOC 2025 application mockup, Functional FM radio app

Hi Lovro,

welcome to the community!

Thanks for sharing your proposal, that's pretty nice :) I'm, however, not a mentor for that project, so I can only give general feedback, but hey, maybe that helps:

- It would be good if you offered a bit of self-assessment (I know how hard that is!) on your Python and C++ skills. Like, have you only written these languages as part of "fixed-form" classwork, or did you structure programs yourself? Being honest with yourself here helps you: it helps the mentors assess how much they expect you to do in short time :) )
  Especially considering your plan to write GNU Radio 4 blocks, a solid background in C++ would currently be preferable.

- you mention you want to port things to GNU Radio 4. Wow, cool! Note that you also say you'll be using Ubuntu 22.03. That won't work out; you'll need to update; Ubuntu 22.04 doesn't ship sufficient compiler versions for GR4.
  Updating to 24.04 would also be desirable if you were working on GNU Radio 3; the library versions in 22.04 are just really old already, and if you had Ubuntu 24.04LTS, you could install a GNU Radio 3 that'd be new enough for the work you'd need to do. So, I guess, run an upgrade?

- You mention how hard it is for a computer to decode multiple FM streams at once. PCs are very fast:
  I wouldn't worry about that too much for now; all the stations you can receive at once with an RTL-SDR (which achieves a sampling rate of 2MS/s, I think, thus allowing reception of a 2 MHz wide band) can be demodulated in software even with a very weak computer.

- I really like how you verbally sketch how your system!

- Note that when you use someone else's figure in a proposal, it's pretty important (and a good measure of academic inegrity, too!) to include a reference where you got that figure from :)

Best regards,
Marcus

On 3/26/25 2:26 PM, Lovro Spajić wrote:

Hello!
My name is Lovro Spajić, I'm a second year Computer Engineering student from Croatia.
I'm sending the mockup of my GSOC application looking for feedback to find out where can I improve.

I also have to ask is it possible to start the coding later as my final exams last until the 15th of July,
so before then I won't be able to participate, but after that I have nothing planned(except for gsoc) till the beginning of October.

Thank you for your time!
Best regards,

• Lovro Spajić