swradio is software for Linux and windows for listening to short wave radio. It is a rewrite and simplification of sdr-j-sw. The software supports hackrf devices, rtlsdr devices (using the rt820 tuner chip) and the SDRplay devices. (For the rtlsdr based devices, use was made of a special version of the library, the one by Oliver Jowett. Sources are included in the source tree of this program.)
One of the less common decoders is a drm-decoder, the picture shows the reception of Nigeria. There are not that many drm transmissions, but Kuwait, Tiganesti (i.e. Romenia), and Nigeria are received very well here. The current version is limited to drm transmissions with a spectrum equal to or less than 10 KHz.
Classical decoders are - obviously - available as well. Early evening there is always - at least here - the "Nederlandstalig amateurnet" is well received.
Decoders* are:
- am
- ssb, with selection for usb or lsb;
- psk, with a wide selection of modes and settings and with a visual tuning aid,
- mfsk, with a visual tuning aid,
- rtty, with a wide selection of modes and settings;
- cw, with (almost) automatic selection of speed and a visual tuning aid,
- drm, limited to 10 k bandwidth;
- navtex (amtor), with a wide selection of options;
- weatherfax decoder, with selection of a variety of settings.
The "main screen" shows - next to the spectrum (or, if the widget is touched with the right mouse button a waterfall) -the selected frequency (in Hz), the assumed signal strength at the selected frequency, and - if installed - a brief description of the band to which the selected frequency belongs.
Touching a screen with the right mouse button will change the view on the spectrum from "classical" spectrum view to "waterfall" (and back).
This feature applies to both the display showing the full spectrum as the display showing the "decoder" spectrum.
Many typical amateur signals have a small bandwidth, making tuning harder. Take as example Bpsk32, the width of the signal is just a couple of tens of Hz.
Some decoders are therefore equipped with an additional "scope" widget, just showing the signal in the contex of a few hundred Hz.
Clicking with the mouse on a location on such a window will adapt the frequency. The picture shows the "magnifying glass" for psk. It shows that the actual width of the received signal is less than 50 Hz.
If a configured device is connected to the computer where the program runs, the device will be connected and opened. If no device is detected, it is assumed that file input is requested and a file selection menu will appear (input files in PCM format, with a 2 channel, 96000 samples/second configuration will be accepted.)
Most controls are on the main widget. Touching the frequency select button will cause a keypad to be shown where the frequency can be types in (in KHz or MHz).
One may select among a number of different filterings:
- wide, used for e.g. DRM decoding, uses the full 12 k bandwidth;
- am, used - as the name suggests - for am decoding, uses 9 k;
- usb, used for smallband decoding in the upper side band, has a width of 2500 Hz;
- lsb, used for ssb decoding is the lower sideband, has a width of 2500 Hz
The input can be written to a file, that file can be processed later on.
Frequency presets can be stored, together with a user defined label (a program name). A table of preferred frequencies (programs) is maintained between program invocations. A selected frequency can be stored by pressing the save frequency button. If touched, one is asked to specify a name to be used to label that frequency. The pair (name, frequency) then is added to the list.
Selecting such a "preferred program" is just by clicking the mouse on the programname or the associated field with the frequency.
Buttons and slider are equipped with a tooltip, touching the button or slider will show a brief description of the function.
On program startup the program reads in a file ".sw-bandplan.xml" with an xml encoded bandplan from the home directory (folder). An example bandplan file "sw-bandplan.xml" is part of the source distribution.
For Windows there is an installer, to be found in the releases section, setup-swradio.exe, for the swradio. The installer will install an executable as well as the required dll's. The installer will call the official installer for the dll implementing the api to get access to the SDRplay device.
For Linux there is a description of how to create an executable, it is written for Ubuntu, it is, however, simply to translate to scripts to be used with other distros.
Furthermore there is an "appImage", to be found in the releases section (while the indicator at the top mentions "failure", the appImage is correct). The appImage was created - using the travis service - in an Ubuntu 14 environment, it contains the required libraries and should run on any more or less recent Linux environment. (Note that a passwd is asked form since the software tries to install the udev rules for the devices).
I dusted off my old pmSDR, dating from the era that the data was entering the computer through the soundcard. Now, in that time I bought an HP Pavilion since - according to the specs - it could deliver samples with a rate of 192K, sufficient to do experiments with FM demodulation, which is what I wanted to do at that time.
And indeed, samples could be read with a speed of 192k, however, some internal filtering in the stupid computer halved the signal in bandwidth, so receiving a signal sampled at 192k gave me a signal with a bandwidth of less than 96k, completely useless for FM decoding (it is a time ago but still pretty frustrated about it).
(frustration section:) Even further, when sampling on 96k, the band was halved as well, so the effective bandwidth then would only be 48k. Of course a solution to get 96K was to decimate (in software) a signal sampled at 192k with a factor 2, but it was not why I bought the stupid thing.
I'll not report on the discussion I had with the HP service desk (bad for my health), I cannot remember to have met such unwilling (ignorant?) people (and I can assure you that I met lots of them). They, the HP people, (c/w)ould not confirm or falsify that the band was halved. They claimed that they did not have a program to verify my claim, so my claim was ("by definition") false. Seems a little silly for a large organization like HP. Of course, the programs that I wrote to show the bandwidth/samplerates were mine, not from HP, so results I sent them (nice spectrum pictures) were "not admissable as evidence", so after some talking they decided that there was no problem whatsoever, so no need to communicate further. Needless to say that I'll never buy an HP laptop again. (end of frustration section)
Anyway, for using a soundcard, I had to buy an external card, an EMU-202 with which I did all kinds of FM decoding at the time in combination with the pmSDR. Here we need "only" 96k, it works well under Linux and at the time it worked on W7. However, it does not like Windows-10, using it under W10 leads to a crash.
For generating an executable under Ubuntu (16.04 or newer) one may take the following steps.
-
Download the source tree (it is assumed that you have a git client and cmake installed.
git clone https://github.com/JvanKatwijk/swradio-8 -
Fetch needed components
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install qt5-qmake build-essential g++ sudo apt-get install libsndfile1-dev qt5-default libfftw3-dev portaudio19-dev sudo apt-get install zlib1g-dev libusb-1.0-0-dev mesa-common-dev sudo apt-get install libgl1-mesa-dev libqt5opengl5-dev libsamplerate0-dev libqwt-qt5-dev sudo apt-get install qtbase5-dev -
Create the faad_drm library if you want to use the drm decoder. To make life easy, the sources for the faad library are included in the source tree (packed).
cd ./swradio-8 tar zxvf faad2-2.8.8.tar.gz cd faad2-2.8.8 ./configure make sudo make install cd .. rm -rf faad2-2.8.8 -
Device support
a) if you have an SDRplay device, I assume you already have installed the library, otherwise visit "www.sdrplay.com" and follow the instructions. Make sure to uncomment in swradio-8.pro the line
CONFIG += sdrplay
b) the sources for using the pmSDR device are part of the sourcetree. Note that for pmSDR the cardread functions are installed. The idea is to use either the pmSDR or the "fast" devices, reflected in the name. A configuration with (only) pmSDR will be named "swradio-pmsdr", a configuration with (only) fast input devices will be named "swradio-8".
For selecting the pmSDR, make sure to uncomment in swradio-8.pro the line
CONFIG += pmsdr
and to comment out the lines
#CONFIG += sdrplay
#CONFIG += rtlsdr
#CONFIG += hackrf
Create a file /etc/udev/rules.d/96-pmsdr.rules with as content
#
# udev rules file for Microchip 18F4455 USB Micro (PMSDR)
#
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="04d8", ATTRS{idProduct}=="000c", MODE:="0666"
to ensure non-root access to the device through usb.
c) To make life easy, the sources for the required -non-standard - rtlsdr library used are included in the source tree, again as a packed file.
tar zxvf rtl-sdr.tgz
cd rtl-sdr/
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ../ -DINSTALL_UDEV_RULES=ON -DDETACH_KERNEL_DRIVER=ON
make
sudo make install
rm -rf rtl-sdr
sudo ldconfig
cd ..
rm -rf build
cd ..
Make sure that a file exists in the /etc/udev/rules.d directory
describing the device, allowing "ordinary" users to access the device.
d) Create a library for the hackrf device by downloading the sources and compiling
git clone https://github.com/mossmann/hackrf
cd hackrf
cd host
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DINSTALL_UDEV_RULES=ON
sudo make install
Make sure that a file exists in the /etc/udev/rules.d directory
describing the device, allowing "ordinary" users to access the device. I.e.
add yourself to the "plugdev" group.
-
Edit the
swradio-8.profile for configuring the supported devices and decoders. For the devices- CONFIG += sdrplay
- CONFIG += hackrf
- CONFIG += rtlsdr or
- CONFIG += pmsdr
Select - or deselect - decoders:
- CONFIG += am-decoder
- CONFIG += ssb-decoder
- CONFIG += cw-decoder
- CONFIG += amtor-decoder
- CONFIG += psk-decoder
- CONFIG += rtty-decoder
- CONFIG += fax-decoder
- CONFIG += drm-decoder
- CONFIG += mfsk-decoder
Note that the "faad_drm" library is (only) needed for the drm decoder.
The "DESTDIR" parameter in the unix section in the ".pro" file tells where the result is to be put.
- Check the installation path to qwt. If you were downloading it from http://qwt.sourceforge.net/qwtinstall.html please mention the correct path in
qt-dab.profile (for other installation change it accordingly):
INCLUDEPATH += /usr/local/include /usr/local/qwt-6.1.3
- Build and make
qmake swradio-8.pro
make
Alternatively, you could use the "cmake" route. The file CMakeLists.txt-qt5 can be used for qt-5, the file CMakeLists.txt-qt4 is merely used for the construction of the appImage. The configurations here include the three mentioned "fast" devices.
Copyright (C) 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018
Jan van Katwijk ([email protected])
Lazy Chair Computing
The swradio software is made available under the GPL-2.0.
The SDR-J software, of which the sw-radio software is a part,
is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
React
Typescript
Django
Laravel
Facebook
Microsoft
Google
Alibaba
D3
Tencent