Amateur radio, space, technology and other geeky stuff by Alexandru Csete
Articles and blogs about the Funcube Dongle Pro/Pro+ SDR receiver, written by Alexandru Csete OZ9AEC.
About a year ago I wrote about my modified fcdcontrol application that could be used with the Funcube Dongle Pro and Pro+. The news back then was that it could be used on the Raspberry Pi to control the FCD instead of the continuously failing attempts at running qthid. Unfortunately, the fcdcontrol application often crashed due to a problem at the hidapi / libusb layer.
Continue reading “Updated fcdctl for the Funcube Dongle Pro and Pro+”
Although I have had a Raspberry Pi rev B for several weeks now, it wasn’t until last night that I got a chance to try it out. Since several people have reported failed attempts at getting the Funcube Dongle Pro and Pro+ play nicely with the Raspberry Pi, I decided to take it as far as I could in those few hours. The result is this very brief tech note about how to make the Funcube Dongle Pro and Pro+ work on the Raspberry Pi.
Continue reading “The Funcube Dongle Pro and Pro+ on the Raspberry Pi”
I was playing with my Funcube Dongle last Saturday testing Gqrx for the long awaited 2.0 release. I was using the Funcube Dongle together with the shortwave converter I got some time ago and a 5 meter long wire attached via an antenna tuner. Amongst all the traffic there is on shortwaves I recorded these two transmissions: UVB-76 aka. The Buzzer, and whistle like signal believed to be a radar in Israel.
I just noticed today that the latest release of Qthid is available as Debian packages for Debian wheezy (testing) and sid (unstable). As a bonus it contains both Qthid 3.1 and 2.2 so you can easily upgrade the firmware of your brand new Funcube Dongle. It also contains all the necessary setup files and procedures for udev so that no manual setup is required.
I tried to install the package for sid i386 on my Ubuntu 11.04 machine and it worked well. If you try them on different system that uses .deb packages, please let us know how it works.
Thanks to A. Maitland Bottoms and Antoine Beaupré for packaging.
I am happy to inform all users of the Funcube Dongle and GNU Radio, that the gr-fcd driver is now included in the GNU Radio source tree. You can read the announcement here.
This change will be available in the next GNU Radio release, which I think will be 3.5.3, however, if you pull the code from the GNU Radio git repository the changes are already in your tree. Before you upgrade please remove any earlier installations of gr-fcd to avoid conflicting versions of the library.
My repository on Github will no longer be maintained and any future development of gr-fcd will be done within the scope of the GNU Radio project. I hope this will ensure better integration, more maintainers, more testing and easier installation process.
The Qthid Funcube Dongle controller version 3.1 has now been released. This release includes the necessary fixes to make qthid work on Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. Thanks to Mike KØZAP for the patch!
This is the last satellite reception of a series recorded on Monday, February 28, 2011 using the Funcube Dongle software defined radio receiver and the Arrow II hand-held satellite antenna. The satellite is the good old Fuji FO-29 and the recording was made in JO45KG during orbit 71777.
Continue reading “FO-29 satellite reception with Funcube Dongle and Arrow antenna”
This is the seventh satellite reception of a series recorded on Monday, February 28, 2011 using the Funcube Dongle software defined radio receiver and the Arrow II hand-held satellite antenna. The satellite is HO-68 / XW-1 and the recording was made in JO45KG during orbit 5791.
Continue reading “HO-68 CW beacon with Funcube Dongle and Arrow antenna”
The Qt-based Funcube Dongle Controller is now also available as a windows binary package – thanks to Mike Willis G0MJW and David Barber G0OQW who have been trying to build it until we eliminated the two build issues (one of them was my fault 😉
Qthid 3.0 – the Qt-based controller application for the Funcube Dongle – has been released. This release includes support for the full control API available with the 18f firmware for the Funcube Dongle. This should cover all the functionality provided by the “fully functional windows front-end”.
Continue reading “Qthid 3.0 with full API support released!”