So this might he a little off topic, but I picked up an SDR with some cool projects in mind. And when I opened SDR programs I quickly realized I had no idea what I was doing. Much of the terminology seemed foreign, etc. What kind of background knowledge do I need to get up to speed with this stuff? Would a few signals/ DSP course suffice to start out?
I recommend getting all 3 ham radio licenses: technician, General, and extra class. In the process you’ll learn all kinds of things and have a lot of the concepts down. You’ll learn about many different aspects of electronics, antenna design, RF propagation, and fun ways to use radios along the way. And you’ll be ready to put it to use right away with your first license.
So if you research learning materials for those licenses you’ll be off to an awesome start. There’s excellent free and paid books available.
I have all three (WT1J) and I found them to be thin on digital signaling, SDRs, and understanding real world signals. I’d suggest getting a cheap SDR and starting here: https://greatscottgadgets.com/sdr/
You’ll learn how to build a basic fm radio using gnuradio along with other cool stuff, like a simple explanation of decibels among other things.
If you know a bit of mathematics the book "SDR for Engineers" is exactly what you're looking for - it covers the right DSP material that you'll need. For starters, it actually covers the sampling techniques SDR actually uses and (it's published by Analog Devices) covers some of the fancy RF-to-Digital System on Chips available today.
Some DSP books (Like Proakis's) are incredibly long-winded and totally detached from the real world (and I say that as a theoretical physics student) and don't cover the sampling topologies that many SDR's use.
Interestingly, I have some very old communication theory books from the 50s and 60s - they are still useful for Software Defined radio stuff today. The only thing they didn't foresee is the throughput of a modern digital filter being as high as it is.
It depends on what your background is already and what you want to do. I took some signals courses in school and we used the Oppenheimer textbook, but that's a lot of math if all you want to do is receive some ADSB signals.
