State and contextual awareness, reasoning and conclusions formation, and a means of directing application, structural and parameter-level radio reconfiguration are key elements of a cognitive radio. This paper describes a cognitive radio design capable of scaling between the two extremes of minimal cognitive capabilities and complex highly-evolved cognitive radio abilities, which is being adopted for real tests using licensed cognitive radio test spectrum. A memory element stores state, sensor, objectives, actions and conclusions information and the relevance of this information can be varied in order to identify or ignore common traits or occurrences. The decision-making and conclusions formation abilities of this cognitive radio design can use (or choose to ignore using the variable weighting facility) external information relating to the network, and etiquettes in conjunction with the memory element. A set of actions formulated by the reasoning and conclusions formation stages direct the radio reconfiguration. This design is implemented using a General-Purpose Processor (GPP) platform as it currently offers the very high level of reconfigurability required for very malleable cognitive radio design.