Setup Red Pitaya for six HPSDR receivers

August 17, 2017

Setup Red Pitaya HPSDR receiver image: format a micro SD card to FAT32. Find the SD card device name from df – be sure you don’t overwrite your hard drive!

lsblk

Suppose the SD card is at /dev/mmcblk0:

umount /dev/mmcblk0
mkdosfs -F 32 -n HPSDR6rx /dev/mmcblk0

Download the latest .img.zip Red Pitaya beta Ubuntu image and then extract to the SD card:

mount /dev/mmcblk0 /mnt/HPSDR6rx
unzip -p redpitaya_ubuntu*.img.zip | sudo dd of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=4M

sync

Boot the Red Pitaya with this SD card. Connect to Red Pitaya via Ethernet using SSH using Avahi.

ssh root@redpitaya.local

or via serial port Via the web browser Red Pitaya control panel, install Pavel’s six receiver HPSDR app. On the Red Pitaya add the following to rc.local to auto-start the HPSDR server

# Start the SDR Receiver compatible with HPSDR at boot time
cat /opt/redpitaya/www/apps/sdr_receiver_hpsdr/sdr_receiver_hpsdr.bit >/dev/xdevcfg

source /opt/redpitaya/www/apps/sdr_receiver_hpsdr/start.sh

reboot the Red Pitaya

Red Pitaya marketplace Pavel Demin HPSDR — Install Pavel Demin six-receiver HPSDR from Red Pitaya marketplace.

Check HPSDR server

On the Red Pitaya (or via serial/SSH)

ps aux | grep hpsdr

You should see

/opt/redpitaya/www/apps/sdr_receiver_hpsdr/sdr-receiver-hpsdr 1 1 1 1 1 1

Where all the 1’s mean that each receiver is using RX1 SMA connector. You can configure each of the receivers to use RX1 or RX2.

There are several HPSDR compatible programs such as GNU Radio Companion HPSDR client:

apt install gnuradio gr-hpsdr

If the Ubuntu repository gr-hpsdr is out of date, be sure the default gr-hpsdr works for you, then consider the current Github:

git clone https://github.com/Tom-McDermott/gr-hpsdr

for the Cmake command, you may need to tell which directory gnuradio-runtime.pc is in to avoid

GnuRadio Runtime required to compile hpsdr

PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/pkgconfig cmake -B build

Prereqs you’ll need include

libboost-all-dev
libgsl-dev
libczmq-dev

Make a block diagram with GNU Radio Companion, using the hermesNB or hermesWB blocks. If it doesn’t work, try

make uninstall

note that the version 1.2 of gr-hpsdr didn’t seem to update the connection between Gnu Radio Companion and the modules yet. Use the top_block.py directly in Python e.g.

python top_block.py

It seems that GNU Radio ≥ 3.7.10 is needed as 3.7.9 just hangs waiting for connection. If building GNU Radio, be sure to remove the system-installed gnuradio first.

apt remove gnuradio

If you get error

ImportError: libgnuradio-runtime-3.7.10.so.0.0.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Ensure that /usr/local/lib is in LD_LIBRARY_PATH by in your ~/.profile adding the line

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/local/lib

Windows only: OpenHPSDR PowerSDR mRX PS

Linux

Install Pavel Demin six-receiver HPSDR from Red Pitaya marketplace.

Run Pavel Demin six-receiver HPSDR from Red Pitaya marketplace (actually see step #6 to make HPSDR server autostart on boot).

Check HPSDR server