The purpose of this study is to evaluate a low-cost Software Defined Radio (SDR) platform for educational and research purposes. An evaluation of existing SDR platforms and design techniques was performed, identifying low cost hardware and software suitable for a laboratory environment. The idea behind the project is to provide undergraduate students with a generic hardware platform so that they can perform simple radio communication experiments. This paper compares and evaluates the existing research projects and educational lab experiments done for SDR. Basic AM and FM radios are created and simulated on the hardware. The detailed procedure to create a design and download the design onto the hardware has been documented, and tutorials are created for step-by-step procedures to perform the experiments. With their ease of use and low cost, Spartan3E FPGA board and Simulink are the best choices for conducting low frequency radio communication experiments
