OpenWebRX connectors

This project contains a set of connectors that are used by OpenWebRX to interface with SDR hardware.

For this purpose, there's two sockets on every connector:

• a data socket that relays the IQ stream read from the SDR device to multiple clients
• a control socket that allows the controlling instance to change SDR parameters at runtime (e.g. frequency, gain, ...)

By default, the IQ sample format is 32bit floats.

rtl_tcp compatibility

For backwards compatibility, the connectors can additionally provide a secondary socket that provides data in a format compatible with rtl_tcp. Use the --rtltcp option together with the port number you would like to use.

If necessary, the connector will resample the IQ data to an 8 bit data stream as required by the protocol. This means that if your SDR device has a higher sample depth, a loss of data will occur, so other options should probably be preferred.

The connectors do not evaluate any data on an rtl_tcp client connection, so any incoming commands will be discarded. This means that applications using rtl_tcp compatibiltiy will not be able to control the SDR hardware.

Installation

The OpenWebRX project is hosting owrx-connector packages in their repositories. Please click the respective link for Debian or Ubuntu.

Compiling from source

Dependencies

• Please install csdr (version 0.18 or newer) before compiling this project.
• (optional) If you want to work with rtlsdr devices, you will need to install the corresponding header files (on Debian: apt-get install librtlsdr-dev)
• (optional) If you want to work with devices supported by SoapySDR, you will need to install the corresponding header files (on Debian: apt-get install libsoapysdr-dev)

If you have compiled rtlsdr / soapy from source, you should not need to worry about this. The installation should place the headers in their correct locations.

Building

This project comes with a cmake build. It is recommended to build in a separate directory.

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make
sudo make install