Appendix 1 Running SDR on the Raspberry Pi

Explore Software Defined Radio — by Wolfram Donat (28 / 30)

👈 Conclusion | TOC | Try This 👉

After playing with all of this stuff, you probably started thinking, “Why can’t I make this portable? What prevents me from creating an on-the-go package that lets me take my SDR setup to the middle of Death Valley and seeing what RF signals I can pick up?” Or even “Why can’t I make an SDR boombox?”

Well, dear reader, I’ve got you covered. As it happens, GQRX will run on the Raspberry Pi, and I’ve gone through the headaches and dependency-chasing rigamarole for you. I now offer to you the hidden knowledge of how to get your SDR setup working on a Raspberry Pi. Add the official 7-inch touchscreen and a battery pack, and you’re ready to take your setup anywhere on the planet.

As I write this, the Pi v4 has been out for a few months. I haven’t tested this with the very latest 64-bit OS, but everything you’re reading from here forward has been tested to work successfully on both a Pi 3B+ and a first-edition (32-bit) Pi 4. The Pi 3B+ was running Stretch, and the Pi 4 was running the Buster version of the Raspberry Pi OS with a kernel version of at least 4.14. (To check, run

uname -a

and

cat /etc/os-release.)

As you can probably imagine, getting SDR to work on the Pi is almost identical to getting it to work on any other Linux…