After seeing a presentation about “Software Defined Radios” on the “Digitalfunk-Tagung” in Geiersberg, I got very interested in this topic.
So, after a few weeks looking for information on the web, I decided to get my first SDR. Although it has a few issues, I chose the HackRF One as my first piece of SDR-hardware.
Below and on the subpages you can find all information I found out about waterfalls, by now. 😉
I think, the most difficult thing when starting to mess around with SDR is the selection of the OS. Since I’m a Mac-addict, I’d love to see more SDR-software for MacOS. Unfortunately, working with VMs (VirtualMachine) is no solution, because of the lack of performance and USB-Data throughput. In conclusion I can say, selection of the proper OS, depends on the things you want to do with your SDR.
For general reception and listening to plain audiosignals, you can get software for every common OS.
For example:
Cubic SDR (Win, MacOS, Linux)
GQRX (Win, MacOS, Linux)
SDR-Console (only Win… but my favourite!)
SDR Angel (Win, Linux… with interesting plugins)
….and many more….
If you want to mess around with decoding special transmissions, like WX-Satellites, ADS-B, DRM,… or you want to experiment with HF a little deeper, the selection of OS gets more and more trickier. But with a little bit of fiddling around, you can make it done on every OS, too.
Here a few examples of interesting software for this purposes:
GNUradio (Win, Linux, MacOS – a little tricky to install on Mac)
WXtoImg (Win, MacOS, Linux)
dump1090 (Win, MacOS, Linux)
Dream DRM (Win, MacOS, Linux)
….and many more….
Feel free to look on the subpages to find some of my SDR-projects.