A software defined radio is a transmitter and receiver system that uses digital signal processing (DSP) for coding, decoding, modulating, and demodulating data. This project focused on using the IEEE 802.11a specification to create a software radio. The feasibility of using Mathwork,s Simulink and Texas Instrument¡¯s Code Composer Studio to design, test, and prototype an OFDM software radio system on a Texas Instruments CDSK6713 DSP development board was studied. Among the subjects examined were communication with the board through real time data exchange (RTDX), quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM), orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), frame and carrier synchronization, and issues with Simulink DSP code generation for prototyping. This is a senior capstone project performed in Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, at Bradley University in spring 2006. The complete project report is available upon request.