Digital Operating Mode Classification of Real-World Amateur Radio Transmissions
- This study presents an ML approach for classifying digital radio operating modes evaluated on real-world transmissions. We generated 98 different parameterized radio signals from 17 digital operating modes, transmitted each of them on the 70 cm (UHF) amateur radio band, and recorded our transmissions with two different architectures of SDR receivers. Three lightweight ML models were trained exclusively on spectrograms of limited non-transmitted signals with random characters as payloads. This training involved an online data augmentation pipeline to simulate various radio channel impairments. Our best model, EfficientNetB0, achieved an accuracy of 93.80% across the 17 operating modes and 85.47% across all 98 parameterized radio signals, evaluated on our real-world transmissions with
Wikipedia articles as payloads. Furthermore, we analyzed the impact of varying signal durations & the number of FFT bins on classification, assessed the effectiveness of our simulated channel impairments, and tested our models across multiple simulatedThis study presents an ML approach for classifying digital radio operating modes evaluated on real-world transmissions. We generated 98 different parameterized radio signals from 17 digital operating modes, transmitted each of them on the 70 cm (UHF) amateur radio band, and recorded our transmissions with two different architectures of SDR receivers. Three lightweight ML models were trained exclusively on spectrograms of limited non-transmitted signals with random characters as payloads. This training involved an online data augmentation pipeline to simulate various radio channel impairments. Our best model, EfficientNetB0, achieved an accuracy of 93.80% across the 17 operating modes and 85.47% across all 98 parameterized radio signals, evaluated on our real-world transmissions with
Wikipedia articles as payloads. Furthermore, we analyzed the impact of varying signal durations & the number of FFT bins on classification, assessed the effectiveness of our simulated channel impairments, and tested our models across multiple simulated SNRs.…


| Author: | Maximilian Bundscherer, Thomas Schmitt, Ilja Baumann, Tobias BockletORCiD |
|---|---|
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1109/ICASSP49660.2025.10889837 |
| ArXiv Id: | http://arxiv.org/abs/2501.07337 |
| Parent Title (English): | ICASSP 2025 - 2025 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) |
| Publisher: | IEEE |
| Document Type: | conference proceeding (article) |
| Language: | English |
| Date of first Publication: | 2025/01/13 |
| Release Date: | 2025/11/04 |
| Tag: | Amateur; Automatic Modulation Classification; Cognitive Radio; Machine Learning; Radio; Spectrum Monitoring |
| Pagenumber: | 5 |
| First Page: | 1 |
| Last Page: | 5 |
| institutes: | Fakultät Informatik |
| Zentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz (KIZ) | |
| Research Themes: | Digitalisierung & Künstliche Intelligenz |
| Licence (German): | Creative Commons - CC BY - Namensnennung 4.0 International |

