Installing drivers and support for the SDRplay RSP1A, HackRF One and RTL-SDR on a Raspberry Pi

On a newly installed 64 bit Raspberry Pi OS Debian Bookworm operating system.

I have found that this OS provides better performance than Debian or Ubuntu. I hope this helps you. These procedures may work for other SDR hardware except for the drivers and device specific items.

Note: I have included support for the SDRplay RSP1A, HackRF One and RTL-SDR. You will only need to install support for the device(s) that you have.

As of 11/24/2023, liquidsoap that can be used with op25 does not work. I hope this will be resolved soon.

Install Raspberry Pi OS

Download the latest 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm image here: https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspios_arm64/images/
This procedure is developed for version 2023-12-05-raspios-bookworm-arm64. This procedure may not be appropriate for the next major version.
Install the image on a 32 GB or larger SD card. 16 GB may be large enough if you remove unused packages, etc. Use your favorite image program. Use Raspberry Pi Imager or balenaEtcher on Windows. For more help extracting and flashing the image, look on the image help page.
Boot the image in your Raspberry Pi. Allow it to go through the setup procedure, choosing localization settings, WiFi network, etc.
This procedure is written for a user named "pi".
Click Reboot

Change GPU memory allocation

sudo mousepad /boot/firmware/config.txt

Under:
[all]
# Add this line
gpu_mem=128

Under:
# Enable DRM VC4 V3D driver
If necessary, delete the "#" from #max_framebuffers= and change it to max_framebuffers=2

# Add this line
hdmi_enable_4kp60=1

Scroll bar configuration
Sometimes scroll bar behavior is different between applicatons and from what you may prefer. This procedure will make your scroll bar work more like most other operating systems.
Edit or create these files. You may change the values to your preference.

mousepad ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini

# Insert the following into the file:

[Settings]
gtk-primary-button-warps-slider = false

# Save the file.

# Note that Raspberry Pi OS may delete gtk.css.

mousepad ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css

# Insert the following into the file:

.scrollbar {
    -GtkScrollbar-has-backward-stepper: true;
    -GtkScrollbar-has-forward-stepper: true;
    min-width: 18px;
    min-height: 18px;
}

scrollbar slider {
    /* Size of the slider */
    min-width: 14px;
    min-height: 14px;
    border-radius: 5px;

    /* Padding around the slider */
    border: 2px solid transparent;
}

# Save the file.

I suggest that you switch from Wayland to the Openbox window manager. With Way;land, there are GUI compatibility issues and CubicSDR will not run.

sudo raspi-config
Select Advanced Options
Select Wayland
Select X11  Openbox window manager with X11 backend
Tab to <OK> and press enter.
Press the ESC key
Tab to <Finish> and press Enter.
<reboot>

Run Start menu / Preferences / Raspberry Pi Configuration
- Click the Display tab.
  - Disable Screen Blanking, as it will halt your SDR reception.
- Click OK.

Before you begin

The automatic image installaton procedure should update your system, do it now if this did not occur and each day before installing software.
```
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
```

Fix liquidsoap
The Raspberry Pi optimised ffmpeg packages do not work with liquidsoap. This may be fixed in the future.

# To downgrade it back to the debian version, use the following settings in this file:
sudo mousepad /etc/apt/preferences.d/ffmpeg.pref

# Paste this into the file.
Package: ffmpeg libavcodec-dev libavcodec59 libavdevice59 libavfilter8 libavformat-dev libavformat59 libavutil-dev libavutil57 libpostproc56 libswresample-dev libswresample4 libswscale-dev libswscale6
Pin: origin deb.debian.org
Pin-Priority: 1000

# Downgrade it.
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

# Pinning it with a higher priority it will prevent any updates.
sudo mousepad /etc/apt/preferences.d/ffmpeg.pref

# Paste this into the file, replacing the previous contents.
Package: ffmpeg libavcodec-dev libavcodec59 libavdevice59 libavfilter8 libavformat-dev libavformat59 libavutil-dev libavutil57 libpostproc56 libswresample-dev libswresample4 libswscale-dev libswscale6
Pin: origin deb.debian.org
Pin-Priority: 600

Install:

Qt 5 5.15 should now be installed. You can check it by typing apt list -a libqt5core5a

Install these packages

sudo apt install libdouble-conversion-dev
sudo apt install libxi-dev libxcb*
sudo apt install libxkbcommon-x11-0 libxkbcommon-x11-dev

Qt5 5.15

```
sudo apt install qtcreator
```

Install additional Qt5 packages

sudo apt install qt5-qmake qtbase5-dev qtmultimedia5-dev libqt5multimediawidgets5 libqt5multimedia5-plugins qtgstreamer-plugins-qt5 libqt5svg5-dev libqt5serialport5-dev qttools5-dev libqwt-qt5-6 libqwt-qt5-dev
sudo apt install libqt5websockets5-dev libqt5charts5-dev qml-module-qtlocation qml-module-qtpositioning qml-module-qtquick-dialogs qml-module-qtquick-controls qml-module-qtquick-controls2 qtdeclarative5-dev qtpositioning5-dev qtlocation5-dev libqt5texttospeech5-dev libqt5opengl5 libqt5opengl5-dev

Install some more basics

sudo apt install python3.11-dbg python3.11-dev pyqt5-dev python3-sip python3-pyqt5.sip python3-pyqt5 python3-venv python3-pip
sudo apt install man git g++ build-essential ntfs-3g apt-utils libudev-dev at-spi2-core usbutils xarchiver

cmake

Prerequisite
```
sudo apt install libssl-dev
```
Install cmake.
```
sudo apt-get install cmake
```

Before compiling software, set these compiler optimization flags. This must be repeated after a reboot or if you use a different terminal window. Note that with this optimization, this image may not boot on other Raspberry Pi hardware.

# For a 64-bit operating system on a Raspberry Pi 4:
export CXXFLAGS='-O3 -mtune=cortex-a72'
export CFLAGS='-O3 -mtune=cortex-a72'

# For other operating systems:
export CXXFLAGS='-O3 -march=native -mtune=native'
export CFLAGS='-O3 -march=native -mtune=native'

SDRplay API Installation
If you upgrade to API 3.14 from an earlier version, it will break your system.
- Prerequisites
```
sudo apt install libusb-1.0-0 libusb-1.0-0-dev usbutils libfftw3-dev file
sudo service udev restart
```
- Download API 3.14.0 or later for Linux (64 bit) (3.14) from https://www.sdrplay.com/downloads/.
```
cd ~/Downloads # or wherever you downloaded the file
chmod 755 SDRplay_RSP_API-Linux-3.14.0.run
sudo ./SDRplay_RSP_API-Linux-3.14.0.run
sudo ldconfig
```
- To stop and start the API service, use the following commands...
```
sudo systemctl stop sdrplay
sudo systemctl start sdrplay
```
- Type lsusb. Bus 001 Device 003: ID 1df7:3000 or similar should be displayed.
- If you have SDRplay driver crashes, try this: msi2500 driver conflicts
HackRF One installation
- Prerequisites
  If you did not install these for SDRplay:
```
sudo apt install libusb-1.0-0-dev usbutils libfftw3-dev
```
- Install
```
cd ~/
git clone https://github.com/greatscottgadgets/hackrf
cd hackrf/host
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make -j 4
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig
```
- Reboot
- You need to update the HackRF firmware if it does not match the version of the driver. As of this writing, the latest firmware/driver version was 2024.02.1
  Many HackRF devices have firmware version 2018.01.1 or earlier. Use hackrf_info to see if the firmware version matches the driver that you installed.
```
hackrf_info
```
  If you see "Firmware Version: 2024.02.1 (API:1.08)", then it is up to date and you do not need to do the firmware update shown below.
```
# Transfer rate test:
hackrf_transfer -r /dev/null -s 20000000

# Connect an antenna and test sending data:
hackrf_transfer -t /dev/zero
```
- Firmware updating instructions are based on this:
  https://hackrf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/updating_firmware.html#updating-the-spi-flash-firmware
  Note that the zip and tar.xz archives have the firmware files. The git clone procedure does not.
  
  Download hackrf-2024.02.1.zip
  Extract only the firmware-bin directory into the ~/hackrf directory
```
cd ~/hackrf/firmware-bin

# To update the firmware on a working HackRF One, use the hackrf_spiflash program:
hackrf_spiflash -w hackrf_one_usb.bin

# Press the reset button on the HackRF.
hackrf_info

# The new firmware version should now displayed.
# Perform the hackrf_transfer tests above.
```
Install the rtl-sdr driver
Based on a NESDR SMArt SDR. Others should be similar.
- Connect your rtl-sdr to your Raspbery Pi computer. In a terminal window, type lsusb. If it is working, you should see something similar to: Bus 001 Device 008: ID 0bda:2838 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL2838 DVB-T
- We need to "blacklist" the default drivers. This is done by editing blacklist-dvb.conf:
```
sudo mousepad /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-dvb.conf
```
- Add this line to the file:
  blacklist dvb_usb_rtl28xxu
  Save and close the file.
- ```
sudo apt-get install rtl-sdr librtlsdr-dev
```
- reboot
- Connect an antenna. In a terminal window, type rtl_test.
  This tool will continuously read from the device, and report if samples get lost. If you observe no further output, everything is fine.
  Press CTRL-C to stop the test.

GNU Radio 3.10
This will install GNU Radio from packages supplied with Debian. It saves a few hours of installation time over compiling it
Alternately, you can Click Here to install and compile UHD and GNU Radio from source or install a different package version, then skip past this section.

Prerequisites

Install these packages. (some may already be installed).

sudo apt install g++ libcodec2-dev libvolk2-bin libvolk2-dev libvolk2.5 build-essential libgtk-3-dev

sudo apt install libboost-all-dev libgmp-dev swig python3-requests python3-ruamel.yaml python3-setuptools python3-numpy python3-mako python3-sphinx python3-lxml doxygen libsdl1.2-dev libgsl-dev libzmq3-dev cppzmq-dev python3-yaml python3-click python3-click-plugins python3-zmq python3-scipy python3-docutils liborc-0.4-0 liborc-0.4-dev python3-gi-cairo python3-waitress liblog4cpp5-dev liblog4cpp5v5
sudo apt install libsndfile1-dev osspd osspd-pulseaudio sudo osspd-alsa libcppunit-dev libqt5opengl5-dev libpthread-stubs0-dev libudev-dev
sudo apt install pybind11-dev python3-pybind11 pybind11-json-dev libspdlog-dev libspdlog1.10 python3-pygccxml

Install recommended packages

sudo apt install python3-matplotlib python3-networkx python3-pyqt5.qwt libeigen3-dev python3-json-pointer python3-rfc3987 python3-uritemplate python3-webcolors python3-pyqt5.qtopengl

Install UHD and GNU Radio 3.10

Installing them separately will prevent them from installing unwanted packages.

sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends libuhd4.3.0 libuhd-dev
sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends gnuradio gnuradio-dev

# Show version
gnuradio-config-info -v

mousepad ~/.xsessionrc
#add this  export command to the end of the file or to any existing PYTHONPATH line. Save changes to make the variables permanent.
export PYTHONPATH=/usr/lib/python3.11/dist-packages:/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages:/usr/local/lib/python3.11/dist-packages:$PYTHONPATH

Run VOLK profiler for optimal performance
```
volk_profile
```
reboot

Install SoapySDR
SoapySDR is installed with GNU Radio. We need to add a few packages.
```
sudo apt install libsoapysdr-dev soapysdr-tools
```

Install the Soapy SDR module for SDRPlay

cd ~/
git clone https://github.com/pothosware/SoapySDRPlay3.git
cd SoapySDRPlay3
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make -j4
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig

# Type these commands. If your SDR is listed, the hardest work is done!
SoapySDRUtil --info
SoapySDRUtil --probe="driver=sdrplay"

Install the Soapy SDR module for HackRF

cd ~/
git clone https://github.com/pothosware/SoapyHackRF.git
cd SoapyHackRF
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make -j4
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig

# Type this command. Check that your SDR is listed and the details are correct.
SoapySDRUtil --probe="driver=hackrf"

Soapy SDR plugin for RTL-SDR

cd ~/
git clone https://github.com/pothosware/SoapyRTLSDR.git
cd SoapyRTLSDR
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make -j4
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig

# Type this command. Check that your SDR is listed and the details are correct.
SoapySDRUtil --probe="driver=rtlsdr"

Alternate gr-osmosdr module for SDRplay API 3.x - supports RSPduo (all modes) and RSPdx
Please note that this code is still experimental. The installer does find SDRplay, Soapy and HackRF. OsmoSDR does appear in GNU Radio Companion, no reference to SDRplay or Soapy.
```
cd ~/
git clone https://github.com/fventuri/gr-osmosdr.git
cd gr-osmosdr/
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DENABLE_NONFREE=TRUE
```
Under Gnuradio enabled components in the terminal text, check that SDRplay RSP (NONFREE), SoapySDR, HackRF and Osmocom RTLSDR support are listed.
```
make -j4
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig
```

gr-sdrplay3
GNU Radio OOT module for SDRplay RSP devices (SDRplay API V3.x)

cd ~/
git clone https://github.com/fventuri/gr-sdrplay3.git
cd gr-sdrplay3
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make -j4
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig

Run GNU Radio Companion and check that OsmoSDR and SDRplay3 are present with all of the SDRplay devices under SDRplay3 in the tree on the right side of the window.

Install the Pulse Audio Volume Control
If you don't hear any audio, output may be on the incorrect audio device.

sudo apt-get install libpulse0 pulseaudio pavucontrol paprefs pulseaudio-utils libpulse-dev

# Optionally, for systems with Qt5 installed
sudo apt-get install libpulse0 pulseaudio pavucontrol-qt paprefs pulseaudio-utils libpulse-dev

Audio tuning

Edit /etc/pulse/daemon.conf. Copy it in case there are problems.

sudo mousepad /etc/pulse/daemon.conf

# Uncomment the line: enable-remixing = yes

# Find the following lines and change them as shown:
avoid-resampling = yes
default-sample-rate = 48000
default-fragments = 4
default-fragment-size-msec = 10

reboot
If you find that the operating system only has mono audio:
```
sudo mousepad /usr/share/pulseaudio/alsa-mixer/profile-sets/default.conf
```
- Comment out each line in the [Mapping analog-mono] section with a ";" at the beginning of the line.
- Save the file and reboot.

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