Formulas for SDR (Software Defined Radio) on macOS

These formulas are dedicated to run SDR application on macOS, using recent versions of well known applications. It does not intend to provice a comprensive set of SDR application, but to be able to build and run some of them with less hassle than what I've been facing up to now with deprecated versions or unsupported hardware.

For now, these formulas are dedicated to support the following SDR devices.

• RTL-SDR USB dongle

  • Those ~ €15 cheap dongles are by far the best supported devices.

• Analog Device PlutoSDR

  • Those ~ €100 devices have TX capability and a larger frequency bandwidth than RTL-SDR, but are quite less supported, although the Analog Devices keeps releasing update and are quite active.

• LimeSDR

  • These ~ €400 devices have strong TX and RX capability and a very large frequency bandwidth. However their support is simply ugly, with buggy software, rely on legacy applications and APIs and very few applications are able to support them properly, i.e. nice hardware, but notably difficult, if not impossible, to use on macOS.

• GNUradio 3.8 w/ GRC support (Quartz backend, no need for X11)
• Python 3.7
• GQRX
• GR-osmosdr
• GR-iio / libiio

GNUradio 3.8 final has been released this month (August '19) and has still very rough corners to run on macOS with a Quartz backend, especially the gnuradio-companion UI tool. Several bugs are being investigated by the time of writing, and a couple of patches have been proposed but are not yet integrated upstream. Those patches are applied to build GRC on macOS, but for now GR 3.8 on macOS should be considered as very experimental.

• RTL-SDR device seems to work fine with GQRX
• PlutoSDR/RX is quite experimental but works with GQRX
• TX feature is yet to be tested
• LimeSDR is not yet supported (will it be?)
• GRC works without crashing, but several UI glitches remain.

I do not want to support the 10 year old deprecated Python 2.7 interpreter, so all formulas are built against Python 3.7.

Most applications and libraries require patch to successfully build and run, so many sources come from forked Github repositories.

brew tap eblot/sdr
brew install [-d] [-v] -s eblot/sdr/gnuradio
brew install [-d] [-v] -s eblot/sdr/libiio
brew install [-d] [-v] -s eblot/sdr/libad9361
brew install [-d] [-v] --HEAD eblot/sdr/gr-iio
brew install [-d] [-v] --HEAD eblot/sdr/gr-osmosdr
brew install [-d] [-v] --HEAD eblot/sdr/gqrx