Using a Mac kind of adds a little bit of shit to every encounter I have with open-sourcy projects. The really mainstream ones fully support macs, but the sort of off road ones need tweaking and digging, even though by and large OS X is compatible with linux as far as I can tell.

Install macports. I tried using homebrew and failed

port install gqrx

It’ll install an explosion of stuff.

run gqrx

select the device.

192000 sample rate

leave the other stuff at 0. Do not yet know what that does

When I change the output device it crashes hard for some reason. Default works though

You can click and right click on numbers to change them

Around 100Mhz you’ll see some fm stations

Pick a demodulation. WFM mono or stereo.

http://www.smittix.co.uk/rtlsdr-up-and-running-in-mac-osx-yosemite-with-gqrx-gnuradio/

http://gqrx.dk/doc/practical-tricks-and-tips

Here’s a bunch of garbage that didn’t work:

Followed these instructions:

https://github.com/robotastic/homebrew-hackrf

build failed on gr-baz. Hmm. Error

Gruel required to compile baz

Tried doing some stuff. Apparently not updated to gnuradio 3.7? Optional So maybe ok.

rtl_test -t

Reported that it can see my stick (A NooElec R820T2 NESDR Mini 2)

Another useful link: http://blog.opensecurityresearch.com/2012/06/getting-started-with-gnu-radio-and-rtl.html

Screw it. i don’t know how to get this working. Let’s try a different tact.

Fired up my ubuntu virtual machine. Go into settings and add a usb filter for the SDR dongle

sudo apt-get install rtl-sdr

https://rwmj.wordpress.com/tag/gnu-radio/

http://www.instructables.com/id/RTL-SDR-FM-radio-receiver-with-GNU-Radio-Companion/step11/Final-remarks/

Alright After some significant hiccups, changing tacts

https://github.com/roger-/pyrtlsdr

pip install pyrtlsdr

I’d bet that one of the previous stages was necessary to get this going.

Checkout demo_waterfall.py. Pretty cool