We just got our Airspy SDRs delivered to evaluate them as options for a typical satnogs setup.
Although our setup will work with Gnuradio directly, we would also like all our SDRs to work with the fantastic gqrx by @csete for quick debugging of our setup.
Trying to connect airspy with gqrx is not working for me right now. With Airspy plugged in, gqrx is not presenting it as an option.
dmesg output when plugging Airspy in:
[94777.596588] usb 2-2: new high-speed USB device number 26 using xhci_hcd [94777.761157] usb 2-2: New USB device found, idVendor=1d50, idProduct=60a1 [94777.761160] usb 2-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3 [94777.761161] usb 2-2: Product: AIRSPY [94777.761163] usb 2-2: Manufacturer: www.airspy.com [94777.761164] usb 2-2: SerialNumber: AIRSPY SN:644064**********
This is on Fedora 23 (on multiple machines) with latest packaged gqrx 2.3.2
Are you saying that you can use the Airspy device in gnuradio but gqrx can not see it? That would be strange because as far as I know both gnuradio and gqrx use the same driver wrapper, namely gr-osmosdr.
Try running the airspy_info and airspy_rx command line tools and see if they can talk to the airspy or if you have to blacklist the kernel driver. You may have to install some airspy-host package.
You can also run gqrx from the terminal and see if it prints any errors. There you can also see if airpsy support has been included in the gqrx package.
I would also recommend installing to the latest version of gqrx. It looks like 2.5.3 is now available in Fedora 23: https://apps.fedoraproject.org/packages/gqrx - there have been many improvements and bug fixes since 2.3.2, although airspy support has been quite good for a long time thanks to the excellent libairspy driver.
Let me know what you find. I’m sure we can make it work.
Also, I’ve worked with some SDR hardware which simply refuses to work as a non-root user, regardless of device node permissions/ownership in /dev.
Not suggesting this would necessarily be the case for Airspy, but something about your distro of choice may conspire against you in this regard, so it’s a quick thing to try running gqrx as root (Edit: except I’ve just remembered Fedora mightn’t have kdesudo/gksudo et. al. so you may have to do something like pkexec --user root gqrx)
That’s a good point that I didn’t think of because I thought it has been addressed by all common linux distributions.
The preferred way to solve the permission problem for USB devices is to install an udev rule file into e.g. /lib/udev/rules.d/ (system) or /etc/udev/rules.d/ (user) that will allow users of a certain group to access the device. These rules files are distributed with the driver libraries, e.g. here is for the Airspy:
So, all members of the “plugdev” group will have access to the Airspy and running the application as root is no longer necessary.
