NRSC5 Studio: A New Feature-Rich Windows GUI for the nrsc5 HD Radio Decoder

We've recently had several submissions about the release of a new program called NRSC5 Studio, a new native open source Windows and Linux supported GUI for the nrsc5 HD Radio decoder. We note that in the past, we've posted about nrsc5 and the NRSC5-DUI interface.

nrsc5 is an open source decoder for the proprietary HD Radio digital audio standard used by FM broadcasters in North America, and it works with low-cost RTL-SDR dongles. NRSC5 Studio is written in Rust with an egui-based dockable interface, and it wraps nrsc5 to provide tuning, HD1 to HD4 subchannel selection, station presets, and now-playing metadata with album art and station logos.

NRSC5 Studio appears to be quite feature-rich. There's a live FFT spectrum and waterfall display tapped from the same I/Q stream feeding the decoder, a QPSK constellation viewer driven by live MER readings per sideband, and a closed loop AGC that automatically tunes the R820T2 gain table to maximize MER. Other extras include a rolling 8-hour album art collage heat map, a 24-hour song log with CSV export, and TPEG traffic map and animated weather radar decoding on stations that broadcast it (currently iHeartMedia stations only).

A portable zip release is available on the GitHub releases page, requiring no installer or admin rights.

AI-Disclaimer: The software Readme credits GitHub Copilot, an AI tool.