Inspectrum: A tool to inspect signals from SDR

If we are using a software defined radio (SDR) device to capture some signals and planning to analyze it later, we might need a good software to visualize the data. The most obvious solution is to use GNURadio Companion itself as it has the required modules to plot waveform, FFT and waterfall graphs. However, today I found another useful tool which we can use to visualize and inspect recorded signals. It is called Inspectrum. Following are the steps to easily install it and try using a dummy data file generated using GnuRadio Companion.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install inspectrum
sudo apt-get install gnuradio

Now, let's start GnuRadio Companion by using the following command on the terminal.

gnuradio-companion

Create the flow graph shown in the following figure. It reads from a sample Wav file we have stored in our computer and writes it to a new file in the correct format which we need. The file extension of the file we write to should be .cfile in order for the Inspectrum tool to recognize it properly. Let's say our output file name is mydata.cfile.

Flow graph to generate sample data

It's time to try the new tool we wanted to see. Run the following command in the terminal to start Inspectrum with the data file we created.

inspectrum mydata.cfile

Inspectrum window with sample data file

Writing in Sinhala (සිංහල) using Latex (a follow up post)

Sometime back, I wrote a blog post about preparing Latex documents with Sinhala language [1]. I received very good feedbacks for that post and encouraged me to explore more. However recently, I came across a question posted in Stack Exchange regarding Latex documents in Sinhala [2]. The nice thing was that my original blog post was mentioned in that thread. I jumped in and tried to help the person who raised the question. This attempt helped myself to understand another important thing which is about how to use any Sinhala font we want in our Latex documents.

In this article, I decided to write down those simple steps of getting a Sinhala Latex document with our favorite Sinhala font for my future reference. Here we go.

(1) First of all, we need Latex with all the packages installed in our computer. I'm using a 64-bit Ubuntu 16.04 LTS machine. I can use the following command on the terminal to install Latex with all the packages.

sudo apt-get install textlive-full

(2) Now, open your favorite text editor and create a file with the name my-example.tex and save it in some directory (folder). This is the file where we will put our text contents.

(3) Now, you need to put the Sinhala font file in the directory. I'm going to use the fond called Iskoola Potha. It comes as a file with the file extension ttf. If you want the same file I used, you can download it from here [5]. I renamed the font file name to be iskoola-pota.ttf.

(4) Now, everything is set for us to write our Sinhala contents in the Latex file. Open the my-example.tex file and put the following content there.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

\documentclass[12pt]{article} \usepackage[a4paper,left=2.5cm, right=2.5cm, top=2.5cm, bottom=2.5cm]{geometry} \usepackage{fontspec,xltxtra,xunicode} \setmainfont[Extension=.ttf, Language=Sinhala, BoldFont=iskoola-pota, ItalicFont=iskoola-pota]{iskoola-pota} \title{මාතෘකාව මෙතන ලියන්න} \author{අසංක සායක්කාර} \date{2017-07-16} \begin{document} \maketitle \section{සිංහල} මේ මම සිංහලෙන් සකස් කල ලිපියක්. මෙය සකස් කිරිඉමට මම \bf{ලේටෙක්} මෘදුකාංගය පාවිච්චි කලා. එය ඉතාම ප්‍රයෝජනවත් මෙවලමක් මට. \section{English} Some English here and there. \end{document}

(5) It's time to generate the PDF file and see how it looks like. Run the following command from the terminal for that.

xelatex my-example.tex

Now, you may notice that there's a PDF file generated in the local directory where you had your Latex and TTF files. Open the PDF file to see your output.

References:

[1] http://recolog.blogspot.ie/2016/08/preparing-latex-documents-in-sinhala.html
[2] https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/359933/typing-in-sinhala
[3] https://www.icta.lk/fonts/
[4] http://studentlanka.com/2012/03/03/download-sinhala-and-tamil-unicode-fonts-free/

[5] http://www.download.aluth.lk/2015/01/iskoola-pota-font-download.html