Adding support for new receiver hardware

You can easily add support for other receiver hardware, if it has a commandline tool that can output I/Q samples to the standard output.

If your receiver hardware is not supported yet, you will definitely need to edit config_webrx.py. Take a look at these lines:

start_rtl_command="rtl_sdr -s {samp_rate} -f {center_freq} -p {ppm} -".format(rf_gain=rf_gain, center_freq=center_freq, samp_rate=samp_rate, ppm=ppm)
format_conversion="csdr convert_u8_f"

Notice that the command to be run by OpenWebRX is something like:

rtl_sdr (...) -

The rtl_sdr tool is called with various commandline parameters, which are substituted from other settings (like center frequency, sampling rate, PPM). Then the - at the end says that rtl_sdr should output the samples to the standard output instead of a file.

There is another important setting: format_conversion will tell OpenWebRX that the RTL-SDR outputs 8-bit unsigned samples. We have to convert these to 32-bit floating point samples in order to process them with csdr. The available conversion options are listed on the csdr project page. As a quick reference, you can use:

• csdr convert_s16_f for receivers that output signed 16-bit integer data type (AFEDRI SDR, Softrock, etc.),
• csdr convert_s8_f for receivers that output signed 8-bit integer data type (HackRF).

(To understand how and where does data go within OpenWebRX, and how does it further utilize OS pipes and FIFOs, there is a graph in the thesis paper.)

Testing

You can confirm that your receiver's commandline tool works like this:

rtl_sdr - | xxd

It works if you see a bunch of hexadecimal data:

0009c50: c0a6 a71d 48a3 b711 ac24 4a3e dcbd e951  ....H....$J>...Q
0009c60: 83df 7498 24da 37e9 34e1 8f24 da82 a80f  ..t.$.7.4..$....
0009c70: 5538 b926 cefe b76e 9609 4e01 451a 01fc  U8.&...n..N.E...

...and it doesn't work if you do not see anything.

Remember

...to set receiver parameters correctly. Let's say, you own a brand new product called WhateverSDR, which outputs 16-bit I/Q samples at a fixed rate of 200000 sps, from the 2-meter band (145 MHz). It has a commandline tool called whatever_sdr, but it doesn't let you set the sampling rate from the command line. Then you would do this:

start_rtl_command="whatever_sdr -"
format_conversion="csdr convert_s16_f"

Still you have to set the samp_rate = 200000 and center_freq = 145000000 in config_webrx.py, so that OpenWebRX would know what to write on the frequency scale, and what to expect while processing the I/Q data.