Amateur radio, space, technology and other geeky stuff by Alexandru Csete
Support for RTL2832U-based DVB-T dongles and USRP devices from Ettus Research is now available in the Gqrx source code repository.
Support for RTL2832U-based DVB-T devices is available via the rtl-sdr and gr-osmosdr libraries. This also provides support for Ettus Research USRP’s if the gr-uhd package has been installed prior to compiling gr-osmosdr. A complete build from scratch that would support all hardware devices would thus include the following steps:
The Universal Hardware Driver (UHD) for the USRP contains a cool example program that can draw spectrum scope using simple ASCII art. This video shows reception of 8 MHz wide spectrum slices in the broadcast FM band 88 – 108 MHz.
Few days ago I learned about the Quisk software defined radio application for Linux. It is written by James Ahlstrom N2ADR with contributions from other radio amateurs around the world. A quick glance at the home page and the documentation suggested that it is a rather simple application where it is easy to add support for other hardware.
Continue reading “Quisk – A software defined radio for Linux”
Just a quick note that I have successfully installed the Universal Hardware Driver (UHD) for the USRP. The UHD is the next generation hardware driver for the USRP family hardware from Ettus Research and it provides better hardware abstraction and portability as the current drivers.
I already tried to make the switch few weeks ago without success – well, it built fine but without USRP1 support. Now I have realized that it was because I was missing the libusb-1.0 libraries (my current drivers use the old libusb-0.1). After installing the libusb-1.0 devpack it compiled fine including the USRP1 support. Both uhd_find_devices and uhd_usrp_probe detected my USRP1 and the daughterboards that I have currently mounted. I did not have much time to play around with it but it was fun to try the ASCII art spectrum analyzer example that is included with the UHD.
Before you laugh think about how useful this can be over an SSH connection to a remote site 🙂
Switching to GNU Radio next branch was also painless once UHD was installed and in the path. Again, no test runs but GRC comes up with the UHD block. Now on to porting my applications adding UHD support…