Listening To Multiple DMR Channels with DSD+ and a HackRF on Linux

Thanks to Tony C who wrote in and wanted to share a method that he's found to listen to  multiple DMR digital voice channels in Linux. DSD+ is a Windows program that can be used to decode DMR. Although for Windows it is possible to use in Linux via the emulator known as Wine, and pipe the digital audio to it from GQRX. In the quote below, DSD+ "FL" is short for "Fast Lane" which is DSD+'s paid beta service that you can join to get  newer code with more features. Tony writes:

I believe that can bridge the gap between using Linux with the ease of use programs of windows. As I am sure we both can attest that setting up trunk tracking / anything SDR is not as easy on Linux as it is on windows. For example, DSDplus FL makes it extremely easy to identify/decode DMR networks. There are similar things that can be done on Linux, but as I stated, it isn’t as easy to setup.

So the method that I setup and have been using successfully, using Ubuntu and a HackRF, setting up DSDplus 2.98 on wine, that gets audio piped from GQRX using a virtual sink as outlined in https://www.hagensieker.com/wordpress/2018/04/29/dsd-in-ubuntu-18-04/. It was a great blog, but I felt that it was incomplete when trying to get all the voice traffic passed on a network, as it only works on 1 channel at a time.

So I found the control channel for the network and created 5 bookmarks in GQRX and gave them the tag “DMR”. From there I downloaded gqrx scanner https://github.com/neural75/gqrx-scanner followed the install and setup instructions. From there I activated the scanner and GQRX will cycle through the frequencies and when voice traffic is passed, it will stop, and DSDPLUS via wine will decode and record the audio.

[The screenshot] example was for P25, but it has worked in connect+ as well, the only thing is that you cannot bookmark the control channel. I know other options exist out there such as SDRtrunk / op25 which I have used, but I believe this provides a good alternative to those who have used windows and are comfortable with the ease of use of dsdplus FL but want to be on the Linux OS.