SDR on a Mac

RTL-SDR in electrical engineering course at BERKELEY :

https://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~ee123/fa12/rtl_sdr.html

RTL-SDR: Inexpensive Software Defined Radio

What is software-defined radio? A software defined radio system is a system in which the components are implemented in software instead of the traditional way of hardware implementation. It consists of an RF front-end followed by an analog-to-digital converter which provides samples to a host computer. The rest of the processing is done solely in software. Each student in the class will/or already gotten a TVB-T USB dongle based on the Realtek RTL2832U chip. This dongle was originally made to receive and decode the European standard digital television. Last February, a V4L/DVB kernel developer, Antii Palosaari, discovered that there is a device mode in which raw samples can be captured and transferred to a host computer. This feature enables this device to be used as an inexpensive ”Software Defined Radio”. This is a photo of the inner works.In order to use this inexpensive hardware (as shown on the prior page it sells for $20) you need a way of accessing the samples of digital radio frequency data by setting up a server-client system on your mac. This is accomplished via TCP (Transmission Control Protocol as in the TCP/IP system used to access internet programs). K1FM (Alain De Carolis) provides a TCP program that recognizes the RTL-SDR dongle as well as the client software HDSDR in a Wineskin bundle (https://k1fm.us/2017/02/hdsdr-osx-version-2-76-released/). Wine allows Windows-based programs to work on a mac. HDSDR is freeware that performs the signal processing of the radio frequency output from the RTL-SDR. This elegant program was written by Mario Taeubel (http://hdsdr.de/index.html).

UPGRADING MAC OS to Catalina or beyond (64bit) made this install of HDSDR on a Mac unworkable!!! This section is for "historic" interest only.

Installing HDSDR on a Mac

K1FM includes a YouTube video of the installation on his site. I have adapted and added to his video to show my specific setup [NOTE: in the video you will see a work-around for a problem I encountered with the rtl_tcp portion of Alain's bundle. He has now fixed this so you should not need to use my work-around - 73].

Not shown in the video but WSJT-X can also be used to decode JT-9 and JT-65 signals via a Wine install...