Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) is a range of software-defined radios designed and sold by Ettus Research and its parent company, National Instruments.  

The USRP product family is intended to be a comparatively inexpensive hardware platform for software radio, and is commonly used by research labs, universities, and hobbyists.

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Most USRPs connect to a host computer through a high-speed link, which the host-based software uses to control the USRP hardware and transmit/receive data.

Some USRP models also integrate the general functionality of a host computer with an embedded processor that allows the USRP device to operate in a stand-alone fashion.

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The USRP family was designed for accessibility, and many of the products are open source hardware.

The board schematics for select USRP models are freely available for download; all USRP products are controlled with the open source UHD driver, which is free and open source software. 

USRPs are commonly used with the GNU Radio software suite to create complex software-defined radio systems.

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What is GNU Radio?

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GNU Radio is a free software development toolkit that provides signal processing blocks to implement software-defined radios and signal-processing systems.

It can be used with external RF hardware to create software-defined radios, or without hardware in a simulation-like environment.

It is widely used in hobbyist, academic, and commercial environments to support both wireless communications research and real-world radio systems.​

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Start Working with the USRP

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GNURadio offers a really comfortable programming platform, in the sense of block diagram programming.
In order to start studying the program, I highly recommend watching this series of videos on youtube:

GNU Radio Tutorials: Part 1 - GRC, Sources, Sinks, Audio & GUI Blocks

GNU Radio Tutorials: Part 2 - Hysteresis, Noise, Thresholds & Bit Error Rate
GNU Radio Tutorials: Part 3 - Types, Channel Selection & Graphical Sinks
GNU Radio Tutorials: Part 4 - Phase-Shift Keying (PSK), Constellations & Auto-correlation

GNU Radio Tutorials: Part 5 - FFT, Phase calculation, Vectors & GNU Plot

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Example - your first FM Transmitter!

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A cool and easy implementation of a FM trasnimtter is introduced here:

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You can change the "File Source" to MP3 and start broadcasting on a frequency by your choosing.

Check out the results on your home FM receiver!

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Other helpful stuff

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First, two discussion groups which are very helpful and i highly recommend subscribing to are:

USRP-users
Discuss-gnuradio

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Those groups offer assistance and guidance to USRP and GNURadio users via email, with experts willing to answer all of your questions.
Also, you will have access to the discussion archives- when you are searching for something start there!

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And finally,

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Remember to check out my examples regarding the project-

Under Passive Approach --> Distance Estimation you can find my code which was generated in GNURadio and have been modified in python to the project's needs.

Under Passive Approach --> Direction Finding you can find the GRC file for Angle of Arrival (AoA) calculation.

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Good luck!

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