Broadcast FM reception with Gqrx and Funcube Dongle

Here is a short demo showing how to receive broadcast FM with Gqrx. This demo uses the Funcube Dongle, which is really not suited for broadcast FM reception. Gqrx does not employ any tricks to make it sound like it works properly – it just does straightforward FM demodulation with wide FM parameters and you will hear the lack of sufficient bandwidth as distortion on some stations (not all though).

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Howto receive and decode NOAA APT images with the Funcube Dongle and Gqrx

NOAA-18 APT receptionOne of the great advantages of software defined radio receivers is that tuning receiver settings is a matter of adjusting software parameters. Gqrx is no different here and has optimal settings built in for weather satellite reception. This tutorial describes how to receive automatic picture transmissions (APT) from NOAA weather satellites using Gqrx SDR, record them to a WAV file, and finally decode the images using the free and open source Atpdec decoder. If you follow this guide you can end up with very nice results such as the one shown at the end.

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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 The information on this page is no longer updated!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.

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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.

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GQRX C++ Edition

About a week ago I resumed working on GQRX – an experimental AM/FM/SSB software receiver powered by GNU Radio and using Qt for user interface. This time, however, I am not going to continue working on the Python receiver but create a new receiver from scratch written in C++. It will support Funcube Dongle and USRP/UHD devices.

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Qthid Funcube Dongle Controller

Qthid is simple cross platform controller application for the Funcube Dongle Pro and Pro+ software defined radio receivers. It is written using the HID API library and the Qt GUI toolkit. It is a fork and evolution of the qthid002.zip package by Howard Long, G6LVB, available on the Funcube Dongle download page. Qthid is free … Read more

CuteSDR – Open source SDR for Linux, Mac and Windows

CuteSDR screenshotIt looks like Moe Wheatley, AE4JY, is working on a cross platform software defined radio receiver intended for SDR hardware from RFSPACE. It is written using the Qt toolkit and will be available soon under an open source license with the purpose of providing an SDR interface program example for other developers. It is still very early and no code has been released yet, but you can watch this first demo video published few days ago and you can also join the CuteSDR Yahoo group if you are interested in following the project.

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