Open source software defined radio by Alexandru Csete OZ9AEC
Gqrx 2.14.5 is now available for download. This release has a much improved RDS demodulator, as well as additional hardware support (Pluto SDR & Soapy remote).
Linux AppImage, macOS Disk Image, and source code releases can be found on the GitHub release page.
Enjoy!
Gqrx 2.11.5 is now available for download. This release fixes a crash in the handling of the ‘q’ command in the remote control interface.
The new release is available from the download page.
Greetings,
I’m happy to announce this minor bugfix release of gqrx.
Tudor Vedeanu has posted a nice video showing the Airspy HF+ and Gqrx running on the Raspberry Pi 3 and using what appears to be a 7 inch touch screen.
Continue reading “Airspy HF+ and Gqrx running on Raspberry Pi”
Gqrx 2.11.1 has been released and is now available for download.
YouTube user Chris D has posted a video showing Gqrx in action on his Raspberry Pi equipped with the 7″ touch screen. Chris uses an rtl-sdr dongle with what appears to be a home made upconverter.
Continue reading “[PI-SDR] Raspberry PI 3 + 7″ Touchscreen + RTL-SDR + GQRX”
I am happy to announce that Gqrx 2.6 has now been released and ready for download. As promised, this release includes experimental binaries for the Raspberry Pi 2 and 3.
Michael, DG0OPK has been doing a lot of experimenting with running Gqrx on various ARM boards. In this video below, he shows gqrx running on the latest Odroid C2 from Hardkernel, which has a 64 bit, 2 GHz quad-core processor.
Today it was brought to my attention that gqrx works well with the Red Pitaya board running the SDR transceiver code by Pavel Demin. Indeed, looking through the gr-osmosdr commit logs, I could see support was added in December 2015, just around the same time I was packaging gr-osmosdr.
Only a few weeks have passed since the gqrx 2.4 release, there has been enough development going on to justify a new release. This release includes a few new features as well as important bug-fixes.
As you may have noticed, new development for this released has been mostly on the waterfall. The adjustable time span allows us capture spectrum data over longer periods and the save functionality provides a convenient way to save the captured data to a graphics file.
The image below shows an example of such capture. It is a ~20 minute capture of the transponder downlink from the FO-29 amateur radio satellite.
Another example for how this feature can be used is spectrum surveillance. The image below shows the 6–16 MHz HF spectrum over an 8 hour time period. It was captured using a HackRF device.
As written above, the time span can be up to 24 hours, however, this is only an arbitrary limit and we can increase it should the need arise.
Looking forward to seeing how people will use this feature.
Updated packages are already available in our new PPA. Instructions for new users are available on the Ubuntu Install page.
As always, there is an up to date Gqrx package in Macports shortly after the release. There is now also an app bundle available from GitHub or SourceForge. The bundle was built on Mac OS X El Capitan and contains all required third part libraries, as well as the command line utilities that come with the Airspy, RTL-SDR, Hackrf and Bladerf driver libraries. See the included README for details.
The source code can be downloaded from GitHub or SourceForge. Starting with this release, gqrx can also be compiled using cmake, see the README file for details. Building with qmake is still available and will not disappear any time soon, so feel free to use either method.
Have fun!
One year after the 2.3.2 release, Gqrx 2.4 is now available for download. This release includes both new features, important bug-fixes as well as improvements of existing functionality.
Starting with this release, we have a new PPA that contains only Gqrx binaries and uses MyriadRF PPAs for GNU Radio and SDR driver packages. I realize this is inconvenient for existing PPA users; however, this offloads some of the packaging work from me and will ensure more up to date GNU Radio packages for Ubuntu users in the future.
Please make sure you have the previous PPA disabled and old, obsolete packages removed before using the new PPA as instructed on the Ubuntu Install page. Feel free to contact us if you need help with the PPA transition.
As always, there is an up to date Gqrx package in Macports. There is now also an app bundle available from GitHub or SourceForge. The bundle was built on Mac OS X El Capitan and contains all required third part libraries, as well as the command line utilities that come with the Airspy, RTL-SDR, Hackrf and Bladerf driver libraries. See the included README for details.
The source code can be downloaded from GitHub or SourceForge. Starting with this release, gqrx can also be compiled using cmake, see the README file for details. Building with qmake is still available and will not disappear any time soon, so feel free to use either method.
Have fun!
Meteor scatter, or meteor burst communications, is a challenging field within amateur radio communication, where the operators use the ionized trails of meteors for reflection of radio waves.
George Smart, M1GEO, has posted a very nice write-up on his website describing the setup that he uses for meteor scatter reception. The setup uses an RTL-SDR dongle with Gqrx as receiver, and WSJT or MSHV for decoding.
Check out Meteor Scatter Reception on RTL-SDR.
Are you interested in receiving and decoding telemetry from amateur radio satellites? Then check out this excellent article by Jan PE0SAT called Unix TLM (Telemetry) decoding, where Jan gives a description of his setup.
In his Linux setup, Jan uses Gqrx as SDR front-end and Gpredict to track the satellites. As we wrote earlier, Gqrx has a Hamlib-compatible TCP interface so that we can use Gpredict to adjust the receiver frequency with Doppler corrections.
Jan also takes advantage of the Audio/UDP interface in Gqrx as well as the audio routing capabilities of modern Linux desktops to route the demodulated audio from Gqrx to external decoder applications.
All in all, this is a very nice setup that demonstrates well how Gqrx can be hooked up with external applications to get new functionality.
Written by Robert Lainé (robert.laine at sailcut.com), this document provides a practical introduction to getting started with gqrx.
This page lists known applications that take advantage of the network interface in gqrx.
Someone has pointed out to me that it’s been almost a year since gqrx 2.2.0 was released. There have been a few snapshot releases since 2.2.0 and some of them got even included in distributions. However, considering the large number of improvements and bug fixes since 2.2.0 I felt it was appropriate to tag a new release.
The changes since version 2.2.0 include:
Many of these changes are contributed by others as can be seen in the list of contributors.
The source code is available through Github or Sourceforge. Ubuntu packages for Trusty and Utopic are in the PPA. Mac version is expected to be available through Macports soon.
This is probably the last version I am going to release for a very long time, perhaps ever, as I neither have the time nor the interest to continue down this road. Hopefully we can find somebody else to take over further development and maintenance.
Starting with version 2.3 gqrx can be controlled remotely using a simple TCP connection. Currently, the remote control functionality is limited to setting and reading a few parameters but more handles might be added in the future.
Work towards gqrx 2.3 continues although not as fast as I wish. If you grab a snapshot from the git repository you will notice a few improvements. Continue reading “Analog bandwidth, named gain stages and a few UI tweaks”
This document gives a high level overview of the gqrx design seen both from an architectural and a signal processing point of view. Continue reading “Gqrx design”
After nearly one year of development since the last official release, we are now finally ready with Gqrx 2.2. Amongst the new features and bug fixes, this release brings support for the HackRF Jawbreaker and the Funcube Dongle Pro+. See supported hardware for a complete list of devices that are known to work with Gqrx.
I have made a video recording of my first tests using Gqrx and the Funcube Dongle Pro+.
One of the biggest challenges with Gqrx has always been installation difficulties caused by the endless list of dependencies. To address this issue we are now officially packaging Gqrx for Ubuntu Linux and for Mac OS X, both distributions including all the dependencies that are not commonly available for that platform. In the case of Ubuntu Linux this has resulted in a complete GNU Radio package with the full SDK, including awesome tools such as the gnuradio-companion.
The app bundle for Mac OS X does not contain the full GNU Radio SDK; however, it does include various command line utilities that come with the hardware driver packages (rtl_test, hackrf_info, uhd_find_devices, etc).
Note that Ubuntu packages are available through two different channels:
Although it is probably possible to subscribe to both channels there is probably no reason to do so. All packages in gqrx/releases are also made available through gqrx/snapshots.
A list of changes since the previous releases is available in the news.txt file.
Head on to download page and get gqrx 2.2 now!
See Github for a list of known bugs. Feel free to report any new ones that you may encounter.
