sdrangel/Readme.md

SDRangel is an Open Source Qt5/OpenGL SDR and signal analyzer frontend to various hardware.

Although it keeps the same look and feel as its parent application SDRangelove it is a major redesign from it hitting more than half the lines of the code. Therefore the code base cannot be kept in sync anymore with its parent. It also contains enhancements and major differences. So it should now fly with its own wings and with its own name: SDRangel

Source code

Repository branches

• master: the production branch
• dev: the development branch
• fix: production fixes that can't wait
• legacy: the modified code from the parent application hexameron rtl-sdrangelove before a major redeisign of the code was carried out and sync was lost.

Untested plugins

These plugins come from the parent code base and have been maintained so that they compile but they are not being actively tested:

channelrx:

• demodlora
• tcpsrc (although it has evolved please use the udpsrc plugin instead)

Supported hardware

General

Multiple device support

From version 2 SDRangel can integrate more than one hardware device running concurrently.

Transmission support

Transmission or signal generation support for eligible devices (BladeRF and HackRF) is progressively introduced with the following roadmap:

• Phase 1: version 2.2.0: generation to file (File Sink) with AM modulator with simple sine modulation. Fixed sample rate of 48 kS/s (no effective interpolation)
• Phase 2: version 2.2.2: full baseband interpolation chain: in AM modulator and Up Channelizer.
• 2.3.0: SDRplay came into play ...
• Phase 3: version 2.3.1: Improve AM modulator with audio file input and audio input (Mic) support
• Phase 4a: version 2.4.0: FM modulator
• Phase 4b: version 2.5.0: SSB modulator and CW keyer
• Phase 4c: version 2.5.x: WFM modulator
• phase 5: version 3.0.0: BladeRF and HackRF support including final interpolation stage.

Airspy

Airspy is supported through the libairspy library that should be installed in your system for proper build of the software and operation support. Add libairspy-dev to the list of dependencies to install.

If you use your own location for libairspy install directory you need to specify library and include locations. Example with /opt/install/libairspy with the following defines on cmake command line:

-DLIBAIRSPY_LIBRARIES=/opt/install/libairspy/lib/libairspy.so -DLIBAIRSPY_INCLUDE_DIR=/opt/install/libairspy/include

Please note that if you are using a recent version of libairspy (>= 1.0.6) the dynamic retrieval of sample rates is supported. To benefit from it you should modify the plugins/samplesource/airspy/CMakeLists.txt and change line add_definitions(${QT_DEFINITIONS}) by add_definitions("${QT_DEFINITIONS} -DLIBAIRSPY_DYN_RATES"). In fact both lines are present with the last one commented out.

Be also aware that the lower rates (2.5 MS/s or 5 MS/s with modified firmware) are affected by a noise artifact so 10 MS/s is preferable for weak signal work or instrumentation. A decimation by 64 was implemented to facilitate narrow band work at 10 MS/s input rate.

BladeRF

BladeRF is supported through the libbladerf library that should be installed in your system for proper build of the software and operation support. Add libbladerf-dev to the list of dependencies to install.

If you use your own location for libbladeRF install directory you need to specify library and include locations. Example with /opt/install/libbladerf with the following defines on cmake command line:

-DLIBBLADERF_LIBRARIES=/opt/install/libbladeRF/lib/libbladeRF.so -DLIBBLADERF_INCLUDE_DIR=/opt/install/libbladeRF/include

FunCube Dongle

Linux only.

Both Pro and Pro+ are supported with the plugins in fcdpro and fcdproplus respectively. For the Pro+ the band filter selection is not effective as it is handled by the firmware using the center frequency.

The control interface is based on qthid and has been built in the software in the fcdhid library. You don't need anything else than libusb support. Library fcdlib is used to store the constants for each dongle type.

The Pro+ has trouble starting. The sound card interface is not recognized when you just plug it in and start SDRAngel. The workaround is to start qthid then a recording program like Audacity and start recording in Audacity. Then just quit Audacity without saving and quit qthid. After this operation the Pro+ should be recognized by SDRAngel until you unplug it.

HackRF

HackRF is supported through the libhackrf library that should be installed in your system for proper build of the software and operation support. Add libhackrf-dev to the list of dependencies to install. Please note that you will need a recent version (2015.07.2 at least) of libhackrf that supports the sequential listing of devices and the antenna power control (bias tee). To be safe anyway you may choose to build and install the Github version: https://github.com/mossmann/hackrf.git. Note also that the firmware must be updated to match the library version as per instructions found in the HackRF wiki.

If you use your own location for libhackrf install directory you need to specify library and include locations. Example with /opt/install/libhackrf with the following defines on cmake command line:

-DLIBHACKRF_LIBRARIES=/opt/install/libhackrf/lib/libhackrf.so -DLIBHACKRF_INCLUDE_DIR=/opt/install/libhackrf/include

HackRF is better used with a sampling rate of 4.8 MS/s and above. The 2.4 and 3.2 MS/s rates are considered experimental and are way out of specs of the ADC. You may or may not achieve acceptable results depending on the unit. A too low sampling rate will typically create ghost signals (images) and/or raise the noise floor.

RTL-SDR

RTL-SDR based dongles are supported through the librtlsdr library that should be installed in your system for proper build of the software and operation support. Add librtlsdr-dev to the list of dependencies to install.

If you use your own location for librtlsdr install directory you need to specify library and include locations. Example with /opt/install/librtlsdr with the following defines on cmake command line:

-DLIBRTLSDR_LIBRARIES=/opt/install/librtlsdr/lib/librtlsdr.so -DLIBRTLSDR_INCLUDE_DIR=/opt/install/librtlsdr/include

SDRplay

Linux only.

SDRplay devices are supported through the libmirisdr-4 library found in this very same Github space. There is no package distribution for this library and you will have to clone it, build and install it in your system. However Debian packages of SDRangel contain a pre-compiled version of this library.

If you use your own location for libmirisdr-4 install directory you need to specify library and include locations with cmake. For example with /opt/install/libmirisdr the following defines must be added on cmake command line:

-DLIBMIRISDR_LIBRARIES=/opt/install/libmirisdr/lib/libmirisdr.so -DLIBMIRISDR_INCLUDE_DIR=/opt/install/libmirisdr/include

Plugins for special devices

File input

The file source plugin allows the playback of a recorded IQ file. Such a file is obtained using the recording feature. Click on the record button on the left of the main frequency dial to toggle recording. The file has a fixed name test_<n>.sdriq created in the current directory where <n> is the device tab index.

Note that this plugin does not require any of the hardware support libraries nor the libusb library. It is alwasys available in the list of devices as FileSource[0] even if no physical device is connected.

The .sdriq format produced are the 2x2 bytes I/Q samples with a header containing the center frequency of the baseband, the sample rate and the timestamp of the recording start. Note that this header length is a multiple of the sample size so the file can be read with a simple 2x2 bytes I/Q reader such as a GNU Radio file source block. It will just produce a short glitch at the beginning corresponding to the header data.

File output

The file sink plugin allows the recording of the I/Q baseband signal produced by a transmission chain to a file in the .sdriq format thus readable by the file source plugin described just above.

Note that this plugin does not require any of the hardware support libraries nor the libusb library. It is always available in the list of devices as FileSink[0] even if no physical device is connected.

SDRdaemon input

This is the client side of the SDRdaemon server. See the SDRdaemon project in this Github repository. You must specify the address and UDP port to which the server connects and samples will flow into the SDRangel application (default is 127.0.0.1port 9090). It uses the meta data to retrieve the sample flow characteristics such as sample rate and receiveng center frequency.

There is an automated skew rate compensation in place. During rate readjustemnt streaming can be suspended or signal glitches can occur for about one second.

This plugin will be built only if the lz4 and libnanomsg libraries are installed in your system. These libraries are available as dev packages in most distributions.

Note that this plugin does not require any of the hardware support libraries nor the libusb library. It is always available in the list of devices as SDRdaemon[0] even if no physical device is connected.

SDRdaemonFEC input

This is a specialized client for the SDRdaemon server that matches the SDRdaemon with FEC option (sdrdaemonfec binary). The frame format is quite different from what it is without FEC and it also does not have the exact same functionnalities so a different plugin is more practiclal than trying to fit both versions in one plugin.

Using this scheme the remote operation is more robust in case conditions are not optimal. While SDRdaemon without FEC will work fine on copper or fiber lines the FEC version is recommended for WiFi links where even in good conditions some UDP packets might get lost.

This plugin will be built only if the libnanomsg and the CM256cc library are installed in your system. libnanomsg is available as a dev package in most distributions For CM256cc if you install it in a non standard directory you will then have to specify the include and library paths on the cmake command line. Say if you install cm256cc in /opt/install/cm256cc you will have to add -DCM256CC_INCLUDE_DIR=/opt/install/cm256cc/include/cm256cc -DCM256CC_LIBRARIES=/opt/install/cm256cc/lib/libcm256cc.so to the cmake commands.

Note that this plugin does not require any of the hardware support libraries nor the libusb library. It is always available in the list of devices as SDRdaemonFEC[0] even if no physical device is connected.

Channel plugins with special conditions

DSD (Digital Speech Decoder)

This is the demoddsd plugin. At present it can be used to decode the following digital speech formats:

• DMR/MOTOTRBO
• dPMR
• D-Star
• Yaesu System Fusion (YSF)

It is based on the DSDcc C++ library which is a rewrite of the original DSD program. So you will need to have DSDcc installed in your system. Please follow instructions in DSDcc readme to build and install DSDcc. If you install it in a custom location say /opt/install/dsdcc you will need to add these defines to the cmake command: -DLIBDSDCC_INCLUDE_DIR=/opt/install/dsdcc/include/dsdcc -DLIBDSDCC_LIBRARIES=/opt/install/dsdcc/lib/libdsdcc.so

If you have one or more serial devices interfacing the AMBE3000 chip in packet mode you can use them to decode AMBE voice frames. For that purpose you will need to compile with SerialDV support. Please refer to this project Readme.md to compile and install SerialDV. If you install it in a custom location say /opt/install/serialdv you will need to add these defines to the cmake command: -DLIBSERIALDV_INCLUDE_DIR=/opt/install/serialdv/include/serialdv -DLIBSERIALDV_LIBRARY=/opt/install/serialdv/lib/libserialdv.so

Although such serial devices work with a serial interface at 400 kb in practice maybe for other reasons they are capable of handling only one conversation at a time. The software will allocate the device dynamically to a conversation with an inactivity timeout of 1 second so that conversations do not get interrupted constantly making the audio output too choppy. In practice you will have to have as many devices connected to your system as the number of conversations you would like to be handled in parallel.

Note that this is not supported in Windows because of trouble with COM port support (contributors welcome!).

Alternatively you can use mbelib but mbelib comes with some copyright issues (see next). If you have mbelib installed in a custom location, say /opt/install/mbelib you will need to add these defines to the cmake command: -DLIBMBE_INCLUDE_DIR=/opt/install/mbelib/include -DLIBMBE_LIBRARY=/opt/install/mbelib/lib/libmbe.so

Possible copyright issues apart (see next) the audio quality with the DVSI AMBE chip is much better.

While DSDcc is intended to be patent-free, mbelib that it uses describes functions that may be covered by one or more U.S. patents owned by DVSI Inc. The source code itself should not be infringing as it merely describes possible methods of implementation. Compiling or using mbelib may infringe on patents rights in your jurisdiction and/or require licensing. It is unknown if DVSI will sell licenses for software that uses mbelib.

Possible copyright issues apart the audio quality with the DVSI AMBE chip is much better.

If you are not comfortable with this just do not install DSDcc and/or mbelib and the plugin will not be compiled and added to SDRangel. For packaged distributions just remove from the installation directory:

• For Linux distributions: plugins/channel/libdemoddsd.so
• For Windows distributions: dsdcc.dll, mbelib.dll, plugins\channel\demoddsd.dll

Software distributions

In the releases section one can find binary distributions for some common systems:

• Windows 64 bit
• Windows 32 bit
• Debian x86_64 (Ubuntu 16.04)
• Debian armv7l (Debian Jessie)

Windows distributions

This is the archive of the complete binary distribution that expands to the sdrangel64 directory for the 64 bit version and sdrangel for the 32 bit version. You can install it anywhere you like and click on sdrangel.exe to start.

Debian distributions

It is provided in the form of a .deb package for x86_64 architectures with SSE 4.1 support or ARMv7l architectures with Neon support. Please note that the ARM version is quite experimental and may or may not work depending on the hardware (it is very slow and unusable on a RPi3 for example).

Install it as usual for a .deb package:

• Make sure the universe repository is in your /etc/apt/sources.list

Then in a terminal do:

• sudo apt-get update
• sudo dpkg -i sdrangel_vx.y.z-1_amd64.deb where x.y.z is the version number
• sudo apt-get -f install this will install missing dependencies

The software is installed in /opt/sdrangel you can start it from the command line with:

• /opt/sdrangel/bin/sdrangel

Software build

Qt version

To be sure you will need at least Qt version 5.5. It definitely does not work with versions earlier than 5.3 but neither 5.3 nor 5.4 were tested.

• Linux builds are made with 5.5.1
• Windows 32 build is made with 5.5.1
• Windows 64 build is made with 5.6

Ubuntu

Prerequisites for 14.04 LTS

Prerequisite to install Qt5 libraries properly: sudo apt-get install libgles2-mesa-dev

Install cmake version 3:

• sudo apt-get install software-properties-common
• sudo add-apt-repository ppa:george-edison55/cmake-3.x
• sudo apt-get update
• sudo apt-get remove cmake (if already installed)
• sudo apt-get install cmake

With newer versions just do:

• sudo apt-get install cmake g++ pkg-config libfftw3-dev libqt5multimedia5-plugins qtmultimedia5-dev qttools5-dev qttools5-dev-tools libqt5opengl5-dev qtbase5-dev libusb-1.0 librtlsdr-dev libboost-all-dev libasound2-dev pulseaudio liblz4-dev
• mkdir build && cd build && cmake ../ && make

librtlsdr-dev is in the universe repo. (utopic 14.10 amd64.)

Mint

Tested with Cinnamon 17.2. Since it is based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS pleae follow instructions for this distribution (paragraph just above).

Debian

For any version of Debian you will need Qt5.

Debian 7 "wheezy" uses Qt4. Qt5 is available from the "wheezy-backports" repo, but this will remove Qt4. Debian 8 "jessie" uses Qt5.

For Debian Jessie or Stretch:

sudo apt-get install cmake g++ pkg-config libfftw3-dev libusb-1.0-0-dev libusb-dev qt5-default qtbase5-dev qtchooser libqt5multimedia5-plugins qtmultimedia5-dev qttools5-dev qttools5-dev-tools libqt5opengl5-dev qtbase5-dev librtlsdr-dev libboost-all-dev libasound2-dev pulseaudio

mkdir build && cd build && cmake ../ && make

openSUSE

This has been tested with the bleeding edge "Thumbleweed" distribution:

sudo zypper install cmake fftw3-devel gcc-c++ libusb-1_0-devel libqt5-qtbase-devel libQt5OpenGL-devel libqt5-qtmultimedia-devel libqt5-qttools-devel libQt5Network-devel libQt5Widgets-devel boost-devel alsa-devel pulseaudio liblz4 liblz4-devel

Then you should be all set to build the software with cmake and make as discussed earlier.

• Note1 for udev rules: installed udev rules for BladeRF and HackRF are targetted at Debian or Ubuntu systems that have a plugdev group for USB hotplug devices. This is not the case in openSUSE. To make the udev rules file compatible just remove the GROUP parameter on all lines and change MODE parameter to 666.
• Note2: A package has been created (thanks Martin!), see: sdrangel. It is based on the 1.0.1 release.

Fedora

This has been tested with Fedora 23 and 22:

• sudo dnf groupinstall "C Development Tools and Libraries"
• sudo dnf install mesa-libGL-devel
• sudo dnf install cmake gcc-c++ pkgconfig fftw-devel libusb-devel qt5-qtbase-devel qt5-qtmultimedia-devel qt5-qttools-devel boost-devel pulseaudio alsa-lib-devel liblz4 liblz4-devel

Then you should be all set to build the software with cmake and make as discussed earlier.

• Note for udev rules: the same as for openSUSE applies. This is detailed in the previous paragraph for openSUSE.

Manjaro

Tested with the 15.09 version with LXDE desktop (community supported). The exact desktop environment should not matter anyway. Since Manjaro is Arch Linux based prerequisites should be similar for Arch and all derivatives.

sudo pacman -S cmake pkg-config fftw qt5-multimedia qt5-tools qt5-base libusb boost boost-libs pulseaudio lz4

Then you should be all set to build the software with cmake and make as discussed earlier.

• Note1 for udev rules: the same as for openSUSE and Fedora applies.
• Note2: A package has been created in the AUR (thanks Mikos!), see: sdrangel-git. It is based on the 205fee6 commit of 8th December 2015.

Windows

This is a rather long story and one may prefer using the software distribution instead. However the brave may follow this link

Mac O/S

A Mac O/S build was contributed from version 2.0.1. Please be aware that this is still experimental.

Android

Despite several attempts and the presence of Android related stuff still present in the .pro files there is no Android build available. An APK can be built but Qt fails miserably at porting applications other than its ridiculously simple examples. When multi-threading is involved a lot like in SDRangel this simply crashes at the very beginning of the application when starting the event loop.

Contributors welcome!

Software installation on Linux flavours

Simply do make install or sudo make install depending on you user rights on the target installation directory. On most systems the default installation directory is /usr/local a custom installation directory can be specified with the -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=... option on the cmake command line as usual with cmake.

You can uninstall the software with make uninstall or sudo make uninstall from the build directory (it needs the install_manifest.txt file in the same directory and is automatically created by the make installcommand). Note that this will not remove the possible empty directories.

Known Issues

• The message queuing model supports a n:1 connection to an object (on its input queue) and a 1:1 connection from an object (on its output queue). Assuming a different model can cause insidious disruptions.
• As the objects input and output queues can be publicly accessed there is no strict control of which objects post messages on these queues. The correct assumption is that messages can be popped from the input queue only by its holder and that messages can be pushed on the output queue only by its holder.
• Objects managing more than one message queue (input + output for example) do not work well under stress conditions. Output queue removed from sample sources but this model has to be revised throughout the application.
• SDRdaemon FEC plugin: it has trouble doing the first connection or reconnecting to another device. The best option is to try then acknowledge the error message and restart SDRangel.

Limitations

• Your hardware. Still SDRangel is relatively conservative on computer resources.

Features

Changes from SDRangelove

See the v1.0.1 first official relase release notes

To Do

• Tx support for devices like Blade-RF or Hack-RF and simple file output (started)
• Tx channels to feed Tx devices (started)
• Possibility to connect channels for example Rx to Tx or single Rx channel to dual Rx channel supporting MI(MO) features like 360 degree polarization detection. Introduce the notion of ports of the same physical device.
• Specialize plugins into channel and sample source plugins since both have almost complete different requirements and only little in common
• 32 bit samples for the Channel Analyzer
• Enhance presets management (Edit, Move, Import/Export from/to human readable format like JSON).
• Headless mode based on a saved configuration in above human readable form
• Allow arbitrary sample rate for channelizers and demodulators (not multiple of 48 kHz). Prerequisite for polyphase channelizer
• Implement polyphase channelizer
• Level calibration
• Even more demods. Contributors welcome!

Developper's notes

Please check the developper's specific readme