LabView Communications

[cochenob]

Just got the news release in my Inbox, and spent a moment looking at the material on the web and have a bunch of questions.

1.  What exactly is this?  This doesn't look like a "Toolkit", but rather a development environment completely separate from LabView.  Is this correct?  It looks LabView-ish.

2. What can I do with this that I can't do now?

3. How does this relate to other existing software tools?  Modulation Toolkit?  Spectral Measurements Toolkit?  Signal Processing?  USRP driver?  etc etc. 

I suppose I'm trying to understand whether this is another piece/tool that or an attempt to pull together all the SDR hardware and software as more coherent product.

[Sarah_Y]

Hi cochenob,

LabVIEW Communications System Design Suite is a new version of LabVIEW designed specifically for the needs of engineers working in the field of communications research and development in mind. You are correct, it is much more than a toolkit. It is a new LabVIEW environment.

There are a lot of new features in LabVIEW Communications designed to provide a single tool chain to go from algorithm development to prototyping on real hardware. For host based prototyping, updated M script nodes and C nodes are included rather purchased separately, and for FPGA based prototyping, a floating point to fixed point math conversion tool and multirate diagram model of computation are brand new additions that significantly speed up the process of algorithm design and implementation.

LabVIEW Communications includes the Modulation Toolkit functions for faster host prototyping.  The NI-USRP driver is also included and installed automatically with LabVIEW Communications.