Low Cost and Power Software Defined Radio Using Raspberry Pi for Disaster Effected Regions

Radio communication is extremely critical for public safety, national safety, and emergency communication systems. During emergency situations like natural disasters, terrorist attacks and plane crashes, inter-operability problems are faced by military and civil safety officials where different aid agencies have radios working in different frequency bands, waveforms and protocols. At the same time, these radios need to be low cost, small size, portable, and require low power to operate. Software defined radio (SDR) technology helps to solve the above problems by implementing radios that can operate on multiple frequency bands and multiple protocols by software control. In this paper, we describe a novel SDR system that we have developed using Raspberry Pi, and a low cost front end solution. The system is low cost, small size, consumes low power and is portable, hence can be quickly deployed in disaster affected areas to save life and resources.