March 20, 2019

QIRX SDR Beta 2.0.1.0 Released: Improvements to DAB Scanner, Recorder and Spectra Display

QIRX SDR is a multimode SDR program compatible with the RTL-SDR. One of its defining features is that it has a built in DAB+ decoder. Recently beta version 2.01 of QIRX SDR was released which has some scanner, recording and spectra display improvements. We note that the beta version appears to be a DAB decoder only, with no multi-mode features. The new features and improvements include:

Scanner:

Configurable w/r to the Muxes to be scanned and/or included in the usual set of Muxes being used.

New algo, considerably faster

"Scan forever" feature, interesting for DX-ers wishing to observe Muxes over a longer time, particularly together with TII logging.

Selectable waiting time after recognition of a Mux, for TII logging.

Recorders:

TII Recorder: File structure improved, now directly importable into Excel, with TAB as separator.

Audio Recorder (DAB+ only): Format selectable between WAV (as usual) and pure AAC (with ADTS headers). The latter allows for high-quality recordings compressed by at least a factor of 10 compared to WAV. The popular Foobar2000 app is able to play these files. Not seekable yet though, because embedding in a suitable container is not yet implemented.

Spectra:

CIR with different scales (Samples, Distance, Time)

Indication of the correlation peaks used for the "FFT Window" determination in the CIR spectrum.

July 13, 2017

QIRX SDR Updated: Legacy DAB, DAB Transmitter Identifications and more

Back in May of this year we posted about QIRX SDR, which back then was a brand new multimode SDR program compatible with the RTL-SDR. One of its defining features is that it has a built in DAB+ decoder. Recently QIRX SDR has been updated to version 0.9.1, the new features are quoted below:

General:

Updated Documentation

Device Frontend: Manual Center Freq. Correction in kHz

Waterfall Spectrum

Raw Recording: Playback Control, for a timed positioning (“seek”) in “arbitrary” large (GBytes) recorded raw files.

DAB:

Legacy DAB, intended for users where DAB+ is not generally available, like in the UK or Spain. As this could only be superficially tested here in Germany (no standard DAB any more, I used some raw samples recorded in Madrid), I would be very interested in feedback of users about it.

Synchronization of raw files recorded with central frequency offset

Enhanced manual synchronization control, mainly for tests in mobile environments

Detection of the Transmitter Identifications (TII). However, as this is a feature only useful for specialized applications, it is not included in the distribution. To my knowledge, qirx is the only DAB SDR having this feature.

Some Bug fixing.

The QIRX team have also added a new Quickstart Guide to help users get set up with their software quickly. In addition QIRX author Clem also writes that the QIRX software will be demonstrated during this weekends Ham-Radio fair in Friedrichshafen, Germany.