Research Programs Across the Region
Australian and New Zealand universities are not newcomers to SDR-based research. The University of Adelaide’s Buckland Park field facility brings decades of HF and VHF ionospheric science, and has more recently demonstrated its wind-profiling radar tracking objects in low Earth orbit. Curtin University and the University of Western Australia co-host ICRAR — partners in the Murchison Widefield Array, a 4,096-element radio telescope whose entire back-end is built on digital signal processing at scale. PHaRLAP, the 3D HF ray-tracing toolbox developed at DSTG in collaboration with the University of Adelaide, is used internationally for over-the-horizon radar modelling and routinely validated against propagation data from amateur SDR networks. Flinders University — hosting SDR 2026 at its Festival Tower campus — contributes signal processing and embedded systems research and has been the long-standing home of the Australian GNU Radio Days. This is the research environment SDR 2026 sits within, and we want more of it in the room.
SDR in the Teaching Laboratory
SDR has also transformed what is possible in the teaching laboratory. A $30 receiver and a laptop running GNU Radio can now demonstrate signal processing, spectrum analysis, modulation, demodulation, radar fundamentals, and radio astronomy in a way that purpose-built laboratory equipment never could — at a fraction of the cost, with complete flexibility to change the experiment. If your department has built a course, a lab session, a project unit, or a student research program around SDR hardware and software, this conference is the right place to share what you learned: what worked, what surprised you, and what the students built.
Who Should Submit
SDR 2026 is actively seeking presentations from across the Australian and New Zealand university sector — engineering schools, physics and astronomy departments, computer science groups, and defence-connected research institutes. In Australia: Flinders, Adelaide, Curtin, UWA, and the many institutions working in adjacent fields. Across the Tasman, the University of Canterbury, Victoria University of Wellington, and the University of Auckland all have engineering and physics programs contributing to spectrum science and SDR-based instrumentation — and New Zealand’s long history in radio science makes SDR 2026 a natural destination for that work. Whether you are a researcher working with distributed HF data, an educator who replaced a rack of test equipment with an open-source SDR stack, or a student who built something unexpected, there is a place for your work here.