Raspberry Pi SDR

[Chris D] noticed that the excellent software defined radio (SDR) software gqrx will run on the Raspberry Pi now. So he married a Raspberry Pi 3, a touchscreen, an RTL-SDR dongle, and an upconverter to make a very nice receiver setup. You can see the receiver in action below.

The video is a little light on build details, but there is a shot of the setup with the pieces labeled, and you should be able to figure it out from there. Of course, gqrx works with lots of different SDR devices so you might have to make adjustments depending on what you use (for example, many of the supported dongles won’t need the upconverter that [Chris] uses).

Experimental Raspberry Pi support for gqrx has only been in place since October of last year, but as you can see in the video, it appears to work quite well. Using a more powerful SDR module would make it even better, but be sure to check the gqrx site for information on what hardware is working with the Pi.

We’ve seen gqrx on a lot of different platforms,  and its features along with the wide range of SDR hardware supported, makes it a very useful tool, indeed. If [Chris] is looking for a neat case, we might suggest this. If you want to build SDR, but don’t want to use canned software like gqrx, we suggest GNU Radio.

Filed under: radio hacks, Raspberry Pi

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