
GNU Radio 3.8 - eplanit
https://www.gnuradio.org/news/2019-08-10-gnu-radio-v3-8-0-0-release/
======
crankylinuxuser
I've designed and took my creation, the RadioInstigator, to Defcon.

[https://hackaday.com/2019/06/05/mobile-sigint-hacking-on-
a-c...](https://hackaday.com/2019/06/05/mobile-sigint-hacking-on-a-civilians-
budget/)

Runs 3.7 GnuRadio along with a whole slew of tools and antennas to boot. I
even put the guy who runs the Wall of Sheep... on the Wall of Sheep. He was
running a Logitech clone dongle. Pwned.

My device is GPL3 and on
[https://gitlab.com/crankylinuxuser/siginttablet](https://gitlab.com/crankylinuxuser/siginttablet)
. It costs around $150 to build.

------
drmpeg
Stupid GNU Radio tricks.

[http://www.w6rz.net/spectrumpaint.mp4](http://www.w6rz.net/spectrumpaint.mp4)

~~~
drmpeg
Ported to 3.8.

[https://github.com/drmpeg/gr-paint38](https://github.com/drmpeg/gr-paint38)

~~~
justinjlynn
Ow, my spectrum.

~~~
rhinoceraptor
You can do this safely, just connect two SDRs together with an attenuator :)

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qubex
I have a LimeSDR. This is where a plugin that allows it to interoperable with
GnuRadio can be found: [https://wiki.myriadrf.org/Gr-
limesdr_Plugin_for_GNURadio](https://wiki.myriadrf.org/Gr-
limesdr_Plugin_for_GNURadio)

Highly recommended.

~~~
daze42
I just bought a LimeSDR Mini a few days ago and I've realized it's hard to
find software that supports it. Which OS/viewing software have you found that
works best with it?

~~~
qubex
I use it under Ubuntu (19.4) and pipe it into Mathematica.

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cameronbrown
GNU Radio is one of those examples of free software being hyper-niche yet
super successful. It's something I want to start playing with in the near
future. Anyone got any advice on where to start?

~~~
drmpeg
Here's a very good tutorial series. It's targeted at hackRF, but has plenty of
general info.

[https://greatscottgadgets.com/sdr/](https://greatscottgadgets.com/sdr/)

~~~
ztetranz
I'm working through his lessons. They're very good.

I don't have a HackRF but I managed to get the "Hello World" flow, i.e.,
listen to FM broadcast radio going nicely with a cheap RTL-SDR by following
lesson 1, but changing the sample rate.

The version of GNU Radio in the Ubuntu apt-get repos for 18.04 is fairly
recent but the GQRX project has a PPA which includes GNU Radio which will
hopefully be updated more frequently.

With default Ubuntu I had problems with the WX slider not moving. I didn't
realize that WX widgets are old and the advice is to use QT. WX is removed in
this latest version.

FWIW, I've since switched to Kubuntu on the same hardware and all widgets work
well including WX but I have followed advice and now use QT.

The sound sink seems to work better if you bypass PulseAudio. Give the sink a
device name, probably hw.

I'm eagerly waiting for one of these that I preordered.
[https://airspy.com/airspy-hf-discovery/](https://airspy.com/airspy-hf-
discovery/) I don't have it yet so I can't swear by it but every report from
those who have one seems to be very good if you want a general purpose
receiver. It covers 0.5 kHz (yes 500 Hz) to 31 MHz and 60 to 260 MHz so not as
wide as some but ... I'm mostly interested in HF so plenty wide enough for me.

------
rgovostes
Out of curiosity, has anyone implemented a dial-up modem with GNU Radio? Or if
not, what would need to be implemented, V.92?

~~~
rasz
[http://www.whence.com/minimodem/](http://www.whence.com/minimodem/) does bell
103
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Pmxkt9mYgM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Pmxkt9mYgM)

This dude [https://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~fisher/modem/](https://www-
users.cs.york.ac.uk/~fisher/modem/) wrote V.32 soft modem stack for SGI Indy
back in 1996

I remember reading back in the day in hacker zines about magic police modem
tapping boxes, but no idea how would that work in the age of echo
cancellation.

~~~
therealx
You'd need to get the secret info on the frequency hopping scheme as well as
the shared encryption key. I've heard of units being ripped out of police cars
for this reason.

~~~
rasz
I meant dialup modem tapping. 2600 or phrack had something about feds being
able to wire into telephone line and record/live decode modem connection. You
could easily write something like this in GNU Radio for <=2400 links (or use
minimodem), but anything higher transmits full duplex on same frequencies -
both modems mutually jam each other.

------
rv-de
Would it be possible to use this as the infrastructure for a clandestine, low-
bandwidth, text-based mesh network? An internet for nerds kind of thing.

~~~
KirinDave
Yes, but also no.

Firstly, it's not a new idea. Folks use JS8call (formerly FT8call). It's quite
sophisticated and can work even below the noise floor. Folks have even gotten
it to work in pretty ridiculous conditions. It has comically low bandwidth but
works at comically low power.

That said, the only place I think this would be "clandestine" is in urban
environments where there is a lot of reflection. Modern electronics and
antennas get the benefit of very high fidelity simulation, so finding a signal
with professional gear (especially if it's cutting edge and understands modern
maps) is pretty wild. I saw a demo of a very expensive system that used Google
Earth as its UX a few years ago, and it could do some amazing things.

Even in cluttered environments with low power transmitters, it still isn't
very secretive. Amateur radio does this thing called "fox hunting" where they
use a variety of handheld elements to quickly track down low power signals.
Some of these contests get pretty technical, with the target transmitter being
highly directional on some axis and deliberately casting false reflections,
and lately they're entirely solar/lifepo4 so they're power constrainted.

But folks with a bit of training and practice can find them really quick.

If you want to be clandestine, then actually what you want to do is overlay
your network over existing networks so that your traffic is difficult to
isolate from a computationally infeasible flood.

~~~
rv-de
With clandestine I just meant unobvious, not perfectly hidden.

~~~
KirinDave
In that case just 𐑤𐑻𐑯 ·𐑖𐑱𐑝𐑾𐑯, 𐑥𐑱𐑚𐑰? Works on the regular internet.

------
mtreis86
That is a lot of changes. Finally got rid of wxgui.

~~~
avian
What was wrong with wxgui? I never understood that. For years everyone was
saying don’t use it, but wxgui widgets always seemed much more polished and
usable. For example, the wxgui waterfall diagram was far beyond anything I
could find in qtgui.

I haven’t used GNU radio in maybe a year, so I don’t know what this release
brings.

~~~
FraKtus
I agree with you; a wxgui will call the native graphic API of the platform
directly while Qt is reimplementing everything, and most of the time it's not
GPU accelerated.

I am currious to hear about how CPU intensive are the 2 versions, wxgui vs Qt.

------
thom
Anyone got any recommendations for hardware and a few first projects to learn
about SDR, especially kid-friendly stuff?

~~~
swebs
The Install Gentoo wiki from /g/ has a good beginner's guide. Unfortunately,
it looks like the wiki is down right now, but here's an archive of the SDR
page.

[http://archive.is/eJYEy](http://archive.is/eJYEy)

~~~
unixhero
Great documentation, but strange that they include a screenshot from a Windows
application...

------
quixoticelixer-
What would i use GNU Radio for?

~~~
ggm
picking up airplane position-indicator feeds with a DTV USB-stick and mapping
the into a display in an rPi?

~~~
OrgNet
You could use it for that but there is software made specifically for this,
like dump1090 for Linux (here for other options: [https://www.rtl-
sdr.com/adsb-aircraft-radar-with-rtl-sdr/](https://www.rtl-sdr.com/adsb-
aircraft-radar-with-rtl-sdr/))... What I found funny when I tried it is that
many small airplanes don't broadcast that signal... are they FBI's planes?

Another interesting use can be reading your electric meter (and the ones of
your neighbors), using GNU Radio or
[https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr](https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr) .

Another one, is reading TPMS from your car wheels (or cars that are passing
by): [https://www.rtl-sdr.com/receiving-decoding-tire-pressure-
mon...](https://www.rtl-sdr.com/receiving-decoding-tire-pressure-monitor-
systems-using-rtl-sdr/) ,
[https://github.com/jboone/tpms](https://github.com/jboone/tpms)

~~~
rhinoceraptor
Half of the fun is implementing the radios yourself, it's a great learning
exercise.

~~~
OrgNet
For me it is a quarter of the fun.... much more fun to see all the data that
is available to anyone over the air....

------
doom2
For licensed ham radio operators, can GNU Radio work with platforms like the
FlexRadio transceivers? Can it send PSK-31 or JT65? I see a lot of
projects/documentation related to using it for all sorts of wireless
communication, but can't find a ton of stuff as it relates to ham radio.

------
londons_explore
I have found gnu radio rather hard to use...

I just want a GUI tool which lets me take data streams, mix them, add them,
run a function over them, preview them as a scope, power spectrum or IQ chart,
play them through a speaker, decode them as mpeg, GPS signals, or anything
else.

It seems GNU radio offers all that, but is so fiendishly hard to use it's
easier just to write code in C to process my data as I want and plot it with
matplotlib.

~~~
michal_f
Same here. I needed a CLI based RTTY decoder but could not get it done in GNU
radio. It turned out to be easier to code this in C++ [1], though I had to
learn a lot on the way. GNU radio has step learning curve...

[1] [https://github.com/ogre/habdec](https://github.com/ogre/habdec)

------
codesushi42
Excellent. What a great tool for SDR.

And for hacking car key fobs.

------
person_of_color
Been out of the SDR community a while. What's the best SDR transceiver that
can transmit?

I used bladeRF last.

------
acd
Gnu radio is great thanks to all the developers for the latest realease enjoy
fun tinkering with radio!

------
madengr
Kudos to the GR team. Now I have some stuff to move to 3.8.

