Gqrx on Mac OS X (almost)

Few weeks ago, or maybe a month or two – I don’t remember, I spent an afternoon trying to build gnuradio-core and gr-audio on Mac OS X without using any macports. It was a casual an undocumented attempt that resulted in a compilation failure. I wasn’t surprised because I made several mistakes along the way, so I just left it an moved on.

Read more

Gqrx SDR receiver


Please visit the new Gqrx website. The information on this page is no longer updated!


Gqrx is a software defined radio receiver for Funcube Dongle (FCD), RTL2832U-based DVB-T devices (RTL-SDR), Universal Software Radio Peripherals (USRP) and Osmo SDR devices. It is powered by GNU Radio and the Qt GUI toolkit.

Read more

Qtmm soundcard modem for decoding AFSK1200

Last week I started on a new experiment trying to integrate the AFSK1200 demodulator code from multimon into a simple Qt-based graphical application. This experiment had two objectives:

  1. Test the feasibility of integrating the AFSK1200 demodulator from multimon into other applications.
  2. Try using the QAudio framework from Qt for audio I/O that should work on both Linux, Windows and Mac OS X.

Read more

GNU Radio 3.3.0 on Mac OS X

Few days ago Michael Dickens announced that the GNU Radio packages on MacPorts have now been updated to 3.3.0 and so I took this opportunity to try it. I didn’t have MacPorts installed so I had to start from scratch; however, installation was quite straightforward because the dependencies are resolved automatically. All I had to do was to download the latest MacPorts dmg and then execute the command

  sudo port install gnuradio

then let it run overnight. It takes a long time since MacPorts builds everything from source. On my iMac it took more than 6 hours. Note that gnuradio is a meta packages that depends on all GNU Radio components.

Read more

High Definition Broadcasting Experiments

As you may know I have been flirting with live broadcasting on Ustream for a while now. While it is a great free service I was not particularly happy about the default webcam stream, which appears to be very low resolution, not much higher than 320×240. Ustream offers high quality streaming using their browser plugin and even high definition-like using the Flash Media Live Encoder from Adobe. Unfortunately, neither of these is available for anything else than Windows.

I wanted to try so much that I even tried the Flash Media Live Encoder under Vista. Well, it was a total fail… My computer froze after broadcasting a few seconds even at VGA-like resolutions. I think I spent a whole Sunday trying various configurations and setting but no luck. Slow computer? Buggy software? Probably both.

Few days ago I learned that Adobe is now in the process of making a Mac version of Flash Media Live Encoder. Hurray! In fact, it is already available for selected beta testers but no timeline for public release. Fortunately, I was able to find a kind soul who has shared the beta package for Mac with the rest of the world (thanks Google search for finding me this) and so I got the opportunity to become an unofficial beta tester.

Read more

Gpredict 0.6 for Mac OS X

Got a cool email few days ago telling me that gpredict 0.6 is available for Mac OS X. Both building instructions as well as ready made packages are available here from the Huntsville Mac User Group. Thanks to Marius Schamschula for doing the good work!