About this notes

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International

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Post to the USKA academy workshop (https://www.uska.ch/2018/02/06/uska-academy-2018/ ) around GNU Radio, a few peers reached out to me with questions about how to get started, without the LiveUSB system used in the workshop in Lucerne.

This tutorial might help - might give some directions how to setup a SDR-Linux environment. Please feel free to edit or pullrequest my Markdown notes on my [GitHub repository](https://github.com/krippendorf/sdr-setup-notes).

All steps are tested with best effort only for Linux mint 18.3 - no Support!

Goals

  • Option 1) Create a VM to explore some SDR stuff under Linux (start here: Setup VM )
  • Option 2) Install SDR stuff on a bare metal PC (start here: Setup requirements)
  • Get some tools around RTL-SDR Dongles
  • Get a up-to-date GNU Radio installation - from Source, not Distro packages
  • Target Hardware UHD, RTL based sticks, PlutoSDR, HackRF One

Drawbacks

  • GNU Radio setup can be a pain. It’ll cost a bit time to install manually. Installation from source has some good advantages. This tutorial is about installation from source and not using a distribution’s package manager.
  • Performance in a VM is not as good as a native Linux install on bare metal. Cool graphic stuff might not work and do not expect super-high data rates when routing USB devices from the HOST to the GUEST.
  • The setup takes some time, but gives you some good practice with linux setup procedures
  • I can not give any support if anything goes wrong

What else to explore?

A curated list of some cool, SDR related tools to discover