SDRPlay

I recently bought myself a SDRPlay receiver to play with this technology and maybe build a ground station or meteor scatter detector. The original plan is to setup a receiver on the Motionlab roof with an raspberry pi and send the IQ data via network down to a local server and extract the interesting information. One great software to work remotely with an SDR receiver is the Soapy project.

Install the raspberry pi part

Build system

Install the latest raspberry pi lite version from raspberrypi.org

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install cmake g++ libpython-dev python-numpy swig git

Core system

The soapy part consist of 3 parts. The Core system must be installed first.

git clone https://github.com/pothosware/SoapySDR.git
cd SoapySDR
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make -j4
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig

SDRplay

The SDRplay part consist of two parts one are the proprietary binary libraries from SDRplay itself the the other part is the soapy wrapper for SDRplay.

Binary Libraries

The driver can be downloaded from the SDRplay homepage https://www.sdrplay.com/rpi2dl.php

chmod 777 SDRplay_RSP_API-RPi-2.11.1.run
./SDRplay_RSP_API-RPi-2.11.1.run

The SDRplay Soapy wrapper

git clone https://github.com/pothosware/SoapySDRPlay.git
cd SoapySDRPlay
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make -j4
sudo make install

Test the Soapy access

SoapySDRUtil --info
Soapy Server for Remote Access
git clone https://github.com/pothosware/SoapyRemote.git
cd SoapyRemote
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ../ # -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug
make -j4
sudo make install

Run the server

SoapySDRServer --bind

If you want to run it as a service have a look here on how to autostart stuff in linux.