Using GQRX 2.15.9 on macOS to connect to Spyserver

[Robin Kipp]

Hey all,

I recently picked up an Airspy HF+ to venture into the fun and exciting world of SDR and radio communication in general.

Since I use macOS as my main platform, I downloaded the latest version of GQRX, plugged the Airspy into my machine using the USB cable, and started exploring the software, this worked quite well and was overall much easier than I had initially expected.

Now, my goal is to get the YouLoop antenna that came with my Airspy HF+ up on my roof, however this means I'll no longer be able to connect the receiver directly to my Mac.

Some research revealed that one way of doing this would be to hook the Airspy up to a Raspberry Pi with Spyserver installed, and then stream all received data over the network which sounds like a perfect solution to me.

I thus went ahead and set up a Pi with all the necessary tools, and now have Spyserver up and running on it.

My one big issue now is that I cannot get GQRX to connect at all, my attempts so far have ended in an error dialog showing up indicating that no supported devices were found.

While looking into this online, the most recent posts on this topic I could find were from 4 years ago or so, suggesting that it would be possible to connect to Spyserver by selecting "Other" as the IQ source and then specifying a connection string such as Spyserver=0,ip=192.168.1.128,port=5555 but I'm not having any luck with this over here, I also have no connection attempts showing up in my Spyserver instance when I try this.

I was able to verify that Spyserver is up and running and should be configured correctly by using SDR# on a Windows laptop, which was able to establish a connection with no issues.

My understanding is that this support is included in a library called gr-osmosdr, and I did find older articles describing how to compile this on Linux in order to add Spyserver support to GQRX at the time.

What's not clear to me though is whether this is still required these days, and if this will work on macOS as well.

If this can be done and just requires building from source I'd be happy to go down that road, but was hoping that someone on here could give me a heads-up on the current state of Spyserver support in GQRX so I don't end up trying to put something together that just doesn't work.

Any help with this is super greatly appreciated, thanks!

Robin

[Ian Brooks]

I haven't tried GQRX with Spyserver, but SDR++ might be an alternative. It runs on Windows, Linux and Mac. The installation instructions are here:

https://ports.macports.org/port/SDRPlusPlus/

I use SDR++ in Linux and Spyserver Network is one of the sources available in the menu. I tried it with a USB connected HF+, having installed the Linux version of  spyserver and it connected OK. To test this I entered the URL 0.0.0.0:5555. which is an address on my computer. For a remote one you would use the local LAN address that you mentioned. Perhaps you might give it a try. There probably is a way to use gqrx so someone else may be able to help. I still use gqrx for FM reception as I find its RDS decoder to be better than SDR++ or SDR Sharp.

Regards, Ian Brooks, Verwood, Dorset.

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[righthal...@gmail.com]

Using spyserver between the Raspberry Pi and a Mac works Ok.

In the spyserver.config - I had to set device_sample_rate = 192000

you start the spyserver-arm32 with -

spyserver  spyserver.config 

Then on the mac start gqrx with -

gqrx -r

The device string -

ip=192.168.0.15,port=5555,spyserver=0

input rate -

192000

and start it receiving - it should work fine. 192000 was the fastest rate I could use on my network.

The ip address of your pi seems a little strange. Is that what ifconfig said that it was ?

[Robin Kipp]

Hey,

Thanks so much for sharing those instructions, much appreciated!

I've modified my spyserver.config to set a sampling rate of 192000 and restarted the server, that worked just fine.
However, after running gqrx -r and typing in my device string as follows:

ip=192.168.1.128,port=5555,spyserver=0

I still keep getting the following error:
No supported devices found (check the connection and/or udev rules).
Please select another device.
I'm also not seeing anything on the spyserver side that would indicate a connection is being established from my Mac, tcpdump on my Mac also doesn't show any packets being sent on port 5555 so it appears Gqrx isn't really trying to reach out to spyserver...

As for the IP address, my router's DHCP server is set to assign private IPs in the range 192.168.1.100-192.168.1.200, so yes that is correct, I can also ssh into the Pi just fine using that IP.

Robin

[righthal...@gmail.com]

If you can ssh from the Mac to the PI with that address, it is correct.

If it is a udev rules problem, you will need to get them installed or sometimes running as super user will work.

sudo spyserver spyserver.config

Does gqrx work on the PI ? You should be able to run it in normal and spyserver mode on the PI.

[righthal...@gmail.com]

You can run the pi gqrx from the Macintosh using "ssh -K -X" and invoking "gqrx -r" on the pi.

The sound comes out of the PI and the graphics is slow, but it works.

[Robin Kipp]

Thanks a ton for the additional tips, I should have clarified that the no supported devices found error message shows up on my Mac when trying to connect to spyserver, I'm pretty sure spyserver is working correctly as I've tested accessing it on a Windows machine using SDR# and that works like a charm.

As for running Gqrx on the Pi, I have not tested this as of yet because the Pi doesn't have a graphical desktop installed. That being said though, your suggestion of accessing the GUI remotely using ssh -K -X isn't a bad idea at all. Only problem here is the sound coming out of the Pi, as the whole reason for me trying to get spyserver up and running is so that I can install the Pi in a remote location with better reception. If this is what I need to do though, I'm sure I could use something like sox and netcat to stream the audio separately, though that would be quite a bit of a hack :-).
Might also consider OpenWebRX which seems nice, but would only allow me to control my SDR using a browser.

In case you have any other tips on what I could try to resolve my issues of connecting to spyserver using Gqrx I'd really appreciate that, again thanks so much for all your help so far and pointing out some great alternatives.

Robin

[righthal...@gmail.com]

If you have it working from Widows to the Pi, do not understand why you are having trouble with the Macintosh.

I am using Gqrx 2.15.8 from MacPorts with macOS Monterey 12.4 and everything works fine.

Any messages about "udev rules" comes from the PI - the Mac does not use them.

[Stephen Matthias]

You have to delete everything gqrx and then build gqrx with spyserver installed; is what I hear.