paulyc / sdrplaydab Goto Github PK

sdrplayDab is experimental software for Windows, Linux and Raspberry Pi for listening to terrestrial Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB and DAB+). It is derived from Qt-DAB, and designed for sole use with SDRplay RSP devices. It uses a different approach for gain setting and for recognizing DAB frames than used in qt-dab.

As known, DAB transmissions are brought to you by more than one transmitter, a so-called Single Frequency Network. Since I am always curious which transmitters "contribute" to the received signals, there are two extensions: a. The tii window shows - if detectable - the ids of the strongest transmitters b. the impulse window whows - if detectable - the relative delay - in micro seconds - of the data, relative to th strongest transmitter.

Of course, all these computations cost a little additional CPU time, therefore they are optional

a. if "tii_depth=xxx" is set (xxx being 3 or 4) the tii search is done for a maximum of xxx transmitters, b. if "echo_depth=xxx" is set (xxx being 3 or 4) the delays of maximal xxx secondary transmitters are computed.

For Windows, the releases section contains an installer, setup-sdrplayDab.exe. The installer will install the executable of the program together with the required dll's. Note that the installer will call the official installer for the dll implementing the api to get access to the SDRplay device

For Linux, however, one has to create an executable. The approach is the same as for Qt-DAB (although one obviously does not need to install airspy or dabstick handlers).

The GUI of sdrplayDab is almost equal to the GUI of qt-dab. Since the device to be used is the SDRplay RSP, there is no device selector. Starting the program without a connected device will open a menu for file selection (however, note that only files created by sdrplayDab are suitable for processing).

New is that on start up no widget is presented for the SDRplay control. I really like to see as much as possible about the settings and data of the selected service, I can imagine, however, that others just want to listen, without too many widgets on the screen.

As with the widgets for Technical Details and others, touching a button - the one labeled "device handler" - will cause the widget for the SDRplay control to be visible (and touching it again will hide it).

Note that apart from device handling and ofdm handling, the code is the code from qt-dab. It is most likely that this code will be merged with the qt-dab code base.

While it is possible to read in and process a file, neither the main program nor the file handler will do frequency correction, so the data in the file should not have an offset in the frequency.

With sdrplayDab one is able to dump the frequency and gain corrected input into a file, so these files can be processed successfully by sdrplayDab.