Playing around with gqrx

The gqrx tool is an open source software-defined radio (SDR) receiver powered by the GNU radio and the Qt graphical toolkit.

It has many features such as:

• Discovering devices connected to a computer
• Processing I/Q data
• AM, SSB, CW, FM-N, and FM-W (mono and stereo) demodulators
• Recording and playing back audio to/from WAV file
• Recording and playing back raw baseband data
• Streaming audio output over UDP

In this recipe, we will cover basics of gqrx and another tool, RTLSDR.

How to do it...

Following is the recipe to use gqrx:

1. We can install gqrx using the command:

apt install gqrx

2. Once it's done, we run the tool by typing gqrx.
3. We choose our device from the drop-down menu in the window that opens and click OK:

4. Now the GQRX application opens, and on the right-side in the receiver window, we choose the frequency we want to view. Then we go to the file and click on Start DSP:

5. Now we see a waterfall and we should start hearing the sound in our speaker. We can even change the frequency...