Setting up a Raspberry Pi for Ham Radio with RTL-SDR
Over on his blog F4GOH has posted a rather comprehensive tutorial consisting of seven PDF documents showing how he's set up his Raspberry Pi for ham radio and other RF projects. The PDF's essentially form a book that starts with the very basics like preparing an OS for the Pi SD Card, powering on the Pi, finding the IP address and connecting to it with SSH or VNC.
The tutorials move on to installing and using various ham radio programs like Fldigi, WSJT-X , GQRX, GNU Radio, before going on to teach some more Linux concepts. The final two PDF tutorials cover the installation and use of OpenWebRX for remote RTL-SDR use, R2Cloud for decoding weather satellites, and finally Radiosonde Auto RX for decoding radiosonde's on weather balloons.
Most of the tutorials in his 15 tutorial set deal with radios that have TX capability.
Few of the tutorials actually directly address the RTLSDR. Unfortunately, he does not show how to set up a JS8call spotter with the RTLSDR or similar.
when compiling csdr:
make
I get a fatal error: fftw3.h which seems not to be included. Anyone an idea what I am doing wrong?
Cheers,
Hans
I place up to 3 SDRs into a USB hub such as https://www.newegg.com/p/0J2-00H1-00006 and inject
power using a power adapter into the last hub port so they don’t draw from Rpi.
Would it be possible to use a Tablet to control the Ham radio?
Yes, you can use RTL-SDR devices on an android tablet using an OTG USB cable and the SDR Touch application. The main problem is most tablets have a single USB interface, so you may be unable to charge your tablet while you have the SDR plugged in.
I’ve successfully used a USB hub on Android tablet with multiple devices like mouse, keyboard and flash drive. The only thing was that devices had to be plugged into the USB hub before plugged hub connected to the tablet. But you still have to keep in mind that all devices share one single port for its maximum speed and power.