GQRX and gr-osmosdr now with support for SpyServer

Thanks to the work of Lucas Teske, GQRX is now able to connect to SpyServer servers. SpyServer is the IQ streaming server software solution developed by the Airspy SDR developers. It can support Airspy and RTL-SDR devices, and can be used to access these SDRs remotely over a network connection. It is similar to rtl_tcp, but a lot more efficient in terms of network usage, meaning that it performs well over an internet connection. On a previous post we have a tutorial about setting up a SpyServer with an RTL-SDR.

The code modified by Lucas is the gr-osmosdr module, and Lucas' code can be downloaded from his GitHub at github.com/racerxdl/gr-osmosdr. It doesn't yet appear to have been merged into the official osmocom branch. The gr-osmosdr module is a generic block used to access various SDR hardware, so any software that utilizes it (such as GNU Radio) should be able to connect to a SpyServer connection too.

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user

HI, what is the difference between this and KiviSDR?

LamaBleu

There is a thread on reddit with few troubleshooting steps if this can help : https://www.reddit.com/r/RTLSDR/comments/8sgrlc/gqrx_soon_supporting_airspycom_spyservers_it_works/

suds

Since gr-osmosdr supports soapy, would the AirspyHF+ not already be supported through Soapy ?
https://github.com/pothosware/SoapyAirspyHF/wiki
e.g. “soapy=0,driver=airspyhf”

suds

sorry that was meant to be in reply to Nick

Nick

They’re also still missing upstreamed support for Airspy HF devices. Not clear why this is taking so long.

LamaBleu

So long ? Lucas published the patch 24 hours ago… It’s just a patch at this moment.. And he is still working on.
It’s really nice to access spyservers from a native Linux.

Nick

The aforementioned Airspy HF support has been languishing for 11 months, so I’m not optimistic. At the moment, support for that requires a custom build of this fork, followed by a custom build of gqrx to take advantage of it: https://github.com/csete/gr-osmosdr-gqrx/tree/airspyhf