Decoding DAB with an RTL-SDR and SDR-J On an Odroid C2
The Odroid C2 is a $40 USD single board computer with a 1.5 GHz ARM-A53 quad core CPU and 2 GB of RAM. Compared to a Raspberry Pi 3 it is more powerful and costs almost the same. YouTube uploader radio innovation recently wrote into us and wanted to share his video showing SDR-J decoding DAB+ smoothly on his Odroid C2. It seems that SDR-J works perfectly and only uses a small amount of CPU.
DAB stands for Digital Audio Broadcast and is a replacement/alternative to standard broadcast FM stations. SDR-J is a software suite that includes a DAB decoder for the RTL-SDR. It is compatible with Windows, Linux and the Raspberry Pi (and evidently also the Odroid C2). Over on their website they also provide a ready to go Raspberry Pi 2 image, and they write that it should perform well on the Rpi2 platform as well.
We’ve also seen that there is a new variant of SDR-J for the Raspberry Pi (and potentially other similar devices) available on GitHub. This one has a nice touch screen friendly GUI, which should be useful for creating a cheap portable DAB device.
The C2 has a 1.5GHz processor not a 2GHz as stated
Fixed, thanks.
The story behind…
“Actually there’s no 2ghz odroid c2. It was an amlogic mistake. They all run at 1.5ghz including the one reviewed here. Early units was shipping with 2.0ghz labeled and it was only realized later that they were running at 1.5ghz. Then Hardkernel managed to overclock it to 1.8ghz or so.”
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