Earlier this month we posted about sdrtop, a Rust-based SDR bench instrument that runs in a terminal and is aimed at measurement rather than listening. Viktor László (MusiThang on GitHub) has now written in again to share several updates. Viktor notes that the goal is still to "make radio signals and the measurements behind them inspectable, rather than hiding everything behind a decoded result."

The biggest additions are new Wi-Fi tools. sdrtop can now survey 2.4 GHz channels 1 to 13 and name the least busy one, inspect a single channel frame by frame at three time scales, and show a channel's airtime use second by second. These tools need 20 Msps, so you need an SDR like the HackRF. There is also a new POCSAG pager decoder written from the ITU standard without external libraries. Viktor tested it over the air by transmitting with a HackRF and PortaPack Mayhem and receiving with an Airspy R2.

The Airspy R2 is now natively supported too. Its gain staging follows the R2's Linearity and Sensitivity gain curves, and sdrtop warns you before the tuner clips. RTL-SDRs are still fully supported, and native support for the SDRplay RSP1B and Airspy HF+ Discovery is in progress. The code is open source under the GPLv3 and available on GitHub.

AI Disclaimer: The project's CREDITS.md file notes that Claude Code was used for implementation, architecture discussion and problem-solving.