Re: Gnuradio for Raspberry PI 4 and SDRPLay works well, but need documentation

[Glen I Langston]

Thanks Marcus,

Concerning your points, I thought I’d edited the Subject line to
start a new thread.  I’ll be more careful in the future.

Also thanks for your clarification of the source code origin.  I’ve also
directly contacted the folks at SDRPlay.

I do think the SDRPlay folks do want to be more closely integrated
with the Gnuradio folks, as they are partially integrated into 
the OsmoSdr releases.  I’m a little vague on the relationship
between OsmoSdr.org and Gnuradio.  Maybe the relationship is 
“parallel play”.  

Thanks again,

Glen


> On Nov 14, 2019, at 9:11 AM, Müller, Marcus (CEL) <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> Hi Glen,
> 
> first of all: This email nearly eluded my attention – you replied to a
> completely different topic, and that means email clients will sort your
> mail under the "Simulated Time?" thread. Simply don't reply to emails
> if you don't mean to actually reply.
> 
> Then: The SDRPlay block isn't part of GNU Radio itself – it comes from
> somewhere else, and I must admit I don't know from where. You'll
> probably have to download the SDRPlay driver package and look inside.
> 
> Problem with the SDRPlay driver is: It's closed source, and as such,
> they can't link software against GNU Radio (which is GPL), and then
> distribute it. If someone could reverse engineer that and write a GPL-
> compatible driver (and integrate it with soapy or with gr-osmosdr),
> that'd be very cool.
> 
> Best regards,
> Marcus
> 
> On Wed, 2019-11-13 at 20:19 -0500, Glen Langston wrote:
>> Hello all,
>> 
>> This email is a request for documentation on SDRPlay Source block in
>> Gnuradio companion.
>> 
>> I have been testing our Radio Astronomy Spectrometer and Event
>> detection with the SDRPlay RSP1A.   It seems to be working pretty
>> well, using the downloaded OS for Pi from SDRPlay.  They seem to have
>> put a pretty complete version of 3.7.13.4.
>> 
>> Swig and boost are installed and it was fairly easy to build the C++ code in
>> git clone http://www.github.com/WVURAIL/gr-radio_astro
>> 
>> I did update a few items, including VNC and SSH configuration, but
>> mostly it worked out of the box.   I started with a Pi 3B+ but did
>> have some trouble running out of memory, so switched to a PI 4B (4 GB)
>> and the complied
>> code ran well.
>> 
>> Attached is a screen capture of the design, the inputs to the
>> SDRSource and the operating design.   I seem many lines in the
>> frequency range 1416.5 to 1423.5 MHz and I'm wondering if I have the
>> wrong band pass filter selected.   But I the SDRPlay source block
>> inputs don't well match the hardware layout (so far as I can figure
>> out).  (The capture has the wrong frequency label, it should be GHz
>> not MHz).
>> 
>> I've goggled everywhere but have had no luck finding any document on
>> the sdrplay source block in gnuradio companion.   Any suggestions?
>> 
>> Thanks
>> Glen