The Software Defined Radio Conference 2026 brings together academia, industry, defence, and the amateur radio community to share the work driving the field forward. As RF and spectrum engineering re-emerge as central disciplines, SDR sits at the intersection of advanced research and grass-roots experimentation — a domain where the amateur radio community and the broader citizen science tradition continue to shape the tools, techniques, and open infrastructure that the wider ecosystem depends on.
At its core, a software defined radio replaces fixed analogue circuits with flexible digital processing, and this conference will explore every link in that chain. We begin at the antenna, where RF energy is captured, then follow the signal through anti-alias filtering, low-noise amplification, and the critical analog-to-digital conversion stage — comparing flash converters and their raw speed with the precision of sigma-delta architectures, and examining how sampling rate and bit depth shape everything that follows. From there we move into the digital domain: IQ versus real-valued data paths, decimation, channelisation, and the trade-offs involved in moving processing onto FPGAs, general-purpose CPUs, or a combination of both. On the software side, sessions will span GNU Radio flowgraphs, MATLAB and Simulink modelling, FPGA gateware development, and the growing ecosystem of open-source decoder libraries that turn raw samples into meaningful intelligence — from ADS-B and AIS to DAB, GPS, and wideband spectrum capture. Whether you are designing a narrowband receiver for a single signal of interest or building a broadband platform that digitises hundreds of megahertz in a single pass, the conference aims to connect the underlying theory with practical, hands-on implementation.
The data emerging from these platforms is proving extraordinarily useful for serious research, and SDR 2026 will showcase some of the most compelling examples. Passive radar networks built from low-cost receivers are tracking aircraft and weather systems. Distributed sensor arrays are mapping the RF environment across entire cities in real time. Ionospheric sounders assembled from open hardware are producing datasets that rival purpose-built installations costing orders of magnitude more. Across radio astronomy, spectrum regulation, environmental monitoring, and electromagnetic warfare, software defined radio is quietly becoming the instrument of choice — and the research it enables is only accelerating.
Now in its second year, the conference grew out of the inaugural Australian GNU Radio Days held at Flinders University in September 2025 under the GNU Radio Project’s sponsorship. It returns to Adelaide on 28 September – 2 October 2026, supported by the DST Group Chair of Electromagnetic Warfare, Professor Sam Drake. The five-day program spans hands-on workshops and technical talks, and concludes with a Classified Electromagnetic Warfare session.