ShinySDR – Software-defined radio receiver app with a web-based UI and plugins | Hacker News Reader

ShinySDR – Software-defined radio receiver app with a web-based UI and plugins

github.com

64 pointsMrBra14 comments

Pretty commendable. Code graph shows active development frequency on Sat and Sunday and >7pm on weekdays, a serious labor of love side-project with 1K+ commits, what amounts to a single contributor, and you only have one branch, ballsy, I like it.

I have a SDR and a Raspberry Pi. Do you think it would be capable of running ShinySDR?

> I have a SDR and a Raspberry Pi. Do you think it would be capable of running ShinySDR?

This issue[0], though specifically discussing the BeagleBone Black, suggests it might suffer on a pi (based on a quick comparison of their specs).

[0] https://github.com/kpreid/shinysdr/issues/17

SDR is notoriously CPU-heavy if you're doing anything beyond the really simple stuff.

I quickly gave up on using my Pi for SDR and moved to a mid-range mobile Core i5 which is a lot more capable, but even that is starting to strain and I might need to split the processing to a couple of machines in the future.

Looking forward to trying this when I get home.

I have a Pi2 that runs Dump1090 for ADS-B just fine. Though I haven't tried any other SDR related tasks on it.

I am using the core i5 setup for TETRA receiving (2MHz sampling rate/1MHz bandwidth, tuning into 4 different channels in that range each with 64 subchannels). The whole pipeline runs just fine, but I would not be able to run a second pipeline for 4 more channels without faster hardware or a second machine.

Largely this is because it's an inefficient proof-of-concept implementation, but in my experience it takes a lot of work to convert such a thing into a performant receiver.

Does your proof of concept cover unencrypting it, too?

No, I'm not aware of any projects that successfully crack TETRA encryption. That said, all the TETRA traffic around here is unencrypted, including the police and emergency services (surprising to me). The rumour I heard was that it was originally encrypted but they disabled it because key management was a pain in the ass.

I'm basing my stuff on SQ5BPF's work, who added the (purposefully) missing bits in osmocom's osmo-tetra project: https://github.com/sq5bpf

It works, but the code is not pretty and it's a really long pipeline of shell pipes and FIFOs. I'm working on simplifying the whole thing, I've already written a minimal replacement for telive. Hopefully I can change the pipeline from:

GRC tuner flowgraph -> simdemod2.py (pi/4 CQPSK demodulator) -> float_to_bits (pi/4 float to byte-per-bit stream) -> tetra-rx -> telive

to:

tuner.py (combined tuner, pi/4 CQPSK demodulator and pi/4 float to byte-per-bit stream) -> tetra-rx -> tetrarec.py (telive replacement)

Looks great, gotta try to set it up on one of my boxes.

Semi-related: The author also made a nice visualization of important principles for SDR: http://visual-dsp.switchb.org/

(Since it seemingly wasn't posted to HN before, I just did so: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10271214)

I recently bought an SDR dongle, and had my roommate (who is much more knowledgeable about Python dev on OS X than I am) try and get this project compiled and up and running for me-they said it was the most complicated Python project they've ever had to compile, as far as dependencies are concerned.

the TLDR being that SDR software for Mac sucks, Linux (in our case the R Pi2) is a much better option.

If you want to try a SDR client on OSX I would recommend CubicSDR as it works very well (especially since the last update in August).

Thanks for this recommendation - I'm just starting to get in to SDR and GQRX crashes constantly on me :(

Can't wait to try this out. Does anyone have any screen shots to look at in the mean time?

Nice stuff, and pretty damn impressive for a side project. On top of that, clean Python code, and very well commented - the latter especially is hard to find when there is only one contributor. Keep it up.

Given that the title of the project is called Shiny, I wish it had some screenshots of the look and feel of the web-based UI. Seems like that could be a selling point.

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