[Discuss-gnuradio] RTL2832 ($20 USB SDR) support now in gr-baz

[Balint Seeber]

Hi folks,

 

I’ve just added RTL2832 support to gr-baz with support for both tuners (Elonics E4000 and Fitipower FC0013).

 

If you’re not aware, this is sold as a DVB-T USB receiver for ~$20, which is a pretty decent price for a device that can do general purpose SDR at 3.2 MHz and 8-bits! The journey starts with Antti Palosaari who discovered it can be put in a mode where it streams baseband data directly over USB (for analog FM demodulation in software). This resulted in Steve Markgraf’s rtl-sdr user-space capture utility over at Osmocom (see the Osmocom page to find compatible devices).

 

I’ve taken that source and created a fully-featured GNU Radio Source block ‘baz.rtl_source_c’ (with GRC block) that outputs complex values, and allows adjustment of frequency, sample rate and LNA gain. There is also an optional automatic tuner mode control for the E4000. If you also like using Winrad/HDSDR/WRplus, my ExtIO plugin now has support for the device too. The Source block performs internal multi-threaded buffering for smoother performance (this might be over-engineered, but it seemed to help with the ExtIO plugin).

 

You can get the source code from my SVN or github (though please visit the info page first for more info/pre-reqs – e.g. libusb-1.0, etc). It’s experimental, and not the prettiest because I actually ported it back from the ExtIO plugin, but it works for me and if you want to help test/clean it up then that would be very much appreciated!

 

To see it in action, have a peek here: http://youtu.be/FUQd9HOVTk8

 

Balint @spenchdotnet