I am tinkering with an RTL-SDR dongle to listen to FM radio, on a MacBook Pro with OS X Yosemite, and a Windows 8.1 VM running on Parallels Desktop 10. There are several software options available. I’ll go into those that I tried, others that I didn’t, and one that is surprisingly good.
librtlsdr
This is a multi-platform library available as open source. On Mac OS X, you can obtain it using homebrew
brew install librtlsdr
Here’s how you can use the rtl_fm sample available with the library, to record wide-band FM
rtl_fm -f 88700000 -M wbfm - | ffmpeg -f s16le -ar 17000 -ac 2 -i - wbfm.wav
I pipe the output of rtl_fm, which is in signed 16-bit little-endian PCM format, to ffmpeg to produce a WAV file. The WAV file can then be played using Audacity, or any music player of your choice.
SDR#
SDR# is a Windows freeware that used to be open source in the past. It is fairly easy to listen to FM radio by following the SDR# FM radio tutorial from Adafruit. The quality of audio is not so good on a Windows VM.
I attempted to build an older open source version of SDR# using Xamarin Studio for Mac OS X. It fails to run because run-time dependencies such as libsndfile and portaudio, installed through homebrew, are 64-bit binaries. 64-bit build of mono 3.12.0 and libgdiplus (the latter depends on cairo installed through homebrew) from source also does not work due to crash in native code invoked by System.Windows.Forms.XplatUICarbon.CGDisplayBounds. Windows Forms on 64-bit Mono on Mac OS X is currently a no-go.
There’s HDSDR, another Windows freeware, that I haven’t tried. A Mac OS X port of gnuradio is something else I want to try, but it is only available through MacPorts. I don’t use MacPorts, and building gnuradio from source looks daunting due to the number of dependencies.
Radio Receiver Chrome App
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
The open source Radio Receiver App from a developer at Google, is probably the best way to listen to FM radio using RTL-SDR. The sound quality is awesome, and it’s mostly implemented in JavaScript! How cool is that!?
Filed under: .NET, HTML, JavaScript, SDR Image may be NSFW.
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Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
