Saturday, April 23, 2016

GQRX is Broken.....RATS!

Thought I'd try messing around a bit with a few of the USB "dongles" I have last night, and went to fire up GQRX on this PC.

It wouldn't start.

Running it from the command line revealed the following error: gqrx: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib64/libgnuradio-osmosdr-0.1.5git.so.0.0.0: undefined symbol: hackrf_device_list



Google shows nothing posted about this error in the last year, and some of the comments I did find about it related to broken symlinks.

SO....I proceeded to remove ALL of the SDR, radio, hamlib, gnuradio, linrad, hackRF, and other numerous assorted and sundry files from this machine. This took a bit of searching, as removing the software with the YaST package manager still leaves some debris behind in hidden config files and libs.

Did a reboot, reinstalled only gqrx and it's requirements, and was greeted by the same error.

SO.....back to searching, or I guess I can build it all from source, which takes a while, and can be no guarantee of producing an error-free install.

UPDATE

Well, it seems this package provides functionality for a lot of things:

"OsmoSDR Gnuradio Source supports the OsmoSDR hardware, but it also offers a wrapper functionality for FunCube Dongle, Ettus UHD and rtl-sdr radios."

Now to find out why it's broken.... 


UPDATE 2 

Well, I've got one of the little receivers working with a very basic Linrad configuration. Here it is receiving NOAA weather radio on 162.550MHz: 
  

 So, either Linrad uses completely different libraries, or something "fixed" itself.

Linrad is really cool software, and I should spend the time and learn how to use it better. At this point, it's a bit hard to adjust things and change/add things "on the fly". For example, while you can grab the side and/or top and bottom of the screen to resize it, those settings won't "stick" when you exit the program, and it will restart at the size you choose when you set it up the first time. A lot of things can get set in the "Global Parameters" setting, but require a restart to see the changes.

Guess I'm too spoiled by GUIs in my old age!

I'll try running GQRX again, but I have a feeling it's going to stay busted until an update rolls out.

Oh, and Gnuradio doesn't work anymore.

I try and start GRC from the command line, and it barfs back: Warning: Block key "blocks_ctrlport_monitor_performance" not found when loading category tree.
Segmentation fault

Seg faults are bad.................

4 comments:

  1. Lord. I think I will stick to satellite radio. You and my son would get along really well, he's a techie at heart. I have never been able to interest him in radios but when radios and computers are combined, he might go for that.

    ReplyDelete
  2. The little USB "dongle" receivers can be bought for $5 to $20, with the $20 ones being of higher quality.

    There's also a $200 ( ! ) one designed specifically for Ham radio use that's pretty good.

    For just a few $$, plus some FREE software, he could learn a lot, and have some fun.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Oopsie... Fix one thing, break fifteen others! Typical of all the interconnections these days!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Apparently this is a "known problem" from what I've been reading.

      SO.....I can either wait until another update comes along that fixes it, or try and build it from the source code.

      Delete

Keep it civil, please....

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