HFU HF Underground
Technical Topics => SDR - Software Defined Radio => Topic started by: ChrisSmolinski on January 18, 2016, 1931 UTC
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For those who want to use an RTL dongle with their Mac as an SDR, but don't want to go through the hassle of installing the rtl libraries, I've created a server app, CocoaRTLServer 2.0. This is an update that does away with the need to install anything else. Just run this app, then run SdrDx, Cocoa1090, etc.
This app emulates two kinds of SDR servers. First, it acts like rtl_tcp, so it can be used with Cocoa1090 and similar apps. Second, it follows the RF Space protocol, so it can be used with SdrDx.
CocoaRTLServer is entirely free, and can be downloaded here: http://www.blackcatsystems.com/software/cocoa_rtl_server.html
It should work with Mac OS X 10.6 through 10.11.
Some major updates to SdrDx are in the works, adding Wide FM support, including RDS and SCA decoding. These are in the latest beta of SdrDx now.
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Hi Chris et al:
I'm blowing the dust off my old iMac and RTL stick setup, and THANKS a TON for CocoaRTL server...it's nice to be able to use SdrDX now instead of the patchwork of other software i was using.
It's working great on the local machine, but I was trying to access the RTL stick remotely (but within my local network) and can't seem to get a signal. I'm able to get SdrDX to connect to the server (both SdrDx and CocoaRTLServer show connectivity) but absolutely nothing is coming through on the waterfall to indicate the signal is being processed. SdrDX is in 'run' mode, and i've adjusted the I/R to an appropriate level, and my firewall is set to allow SdrDX to communicate (or at least accept incoming connections....)
Any idea what might be going on?
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Unfortunately I've yet to make it work correctly sending the SDR data over the network, vs internally in the same machine. For some reason, the UDP packet loss is huge, resulting in lots of glitches due to missing data.
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Ah, I was wondering if that might be the case. In a sane world (or if I were retired!) I'd play around with a packet sniffer and router configurations.
Since the only driver was wanting to use a faster Mac....I'll use the very decent workaround of remoting into the radio computer and piping the audio through software.
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It's only sending UDP data to 127.0.0.1, as soon as I tried sending broadcast UDP packets to all the network devices, boom, lots of packet loss. And this is on a latest generation 4 GHz Intel Core i7 iMac. Not sure what is up.