Document Type

Conference Paper

Publication Date

2025

DOI

10.18260/1-2--56108

Publication Title

2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Pages

12 pp.

Conference Name

2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, June 22-25, 2025, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Abstract

Teaching of fundamentals of communication systems varies widely across programs in US and abroad, mainly due to the type of undergraduate engineering programs and the depth of the communications field within the curricula. The variety is spread across electrical engineering and electrical engineering technology programs, and programs with focus on telecommunications or which only offer core or elective courses in communications. Adding to the variety, some programs include hands-on laboratory courses, others include simulation-based laboratories most of the time using Matlab, while others may only include lecture courses with no labs. The accessibility of the new software defined radio (SDR) platforms offers the option to introduce unexpensive hardware equipment to support the laboratory component of any communications course setting. This paper presents a collaborative online interactive laboratory (COIL), a partnership between an electrical engineering technology program in US and a telecommunication systems program in Europe, both undergraduate programs. The laboratories rely on using two hardware platforms, the RTL-SDR software defined radio receiver and the ADALM Pluto SDR. The paper presents the collaboration settings, describes the experiments used for the labs, and also discusses how the interactive online collaborative labs were received by the students.

Rights

© 2025 American Society for Engineering Education.

ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2025 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference.

Original Publication Citation

Popescu, O., Popescu, D. C., & Puschita, E. (2025). Collaborative online interactive laboratory on software defined radio fundamentals [Paper presentation]. 2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--56108

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