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.
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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 The information on this page is no longer updated!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.
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:
- Test the feasibility of integrating the AFSK1200 demodulator from multimon into other applications.
- Try using the QAudio framework from Qt for audio I/O that should work on both Linux, Windows and Mac OS X.
Gpredict 1.3 released
Gpredict 1.3 has been packaged and released. The source code is already available from the SourceForge download site. Binary packages will follow soon.
Improved search in the Gpredict saetllite selector
Charles AA1VS has done some cool tweaking to the search functionality in the Gpredict satellite selector. Check out the video below to see how it works.
Qt GUI working on Mac OS X
Thanks to a tip from @blackthorne I have the gr-qtgui component of GNU Radio working on Mac OS X Snow Leopard as well. As reported earlier, previous installations worked well except the Qt GUI part which gave errors like the one reported in my email.
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.
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.
Grig on Mac OS X
I haven’t done any work on grig for the last couple of months. It seems most users are happy with it (or just left giving up every hope).
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!