SDR on Linux

When I attended the Teacher's Institute ad the ARRL, one of the items included in our swag bag was an Software Defined Receiver, specifically the SDRPlay RSP1A. Binaries for Windows and Mac OSX typically work "out of the box", but not so with the Linux version. The SDRPlay folks posted an excellent video tutorial covering the process of installing the necessary drivers and libraries, and building CubicSDR from source. Here's a summary.

1. Download and install the Hardware drivers
2. Choose your workflow: Soapy or GnuRadio?
3. Download and install the appropriate libraries and dependencies
4. Build CubicSDR

The choice of which workflow took me a little time to make, but after a few minutes of research, I opted for Soapy. Here are more details of that step in the process.

HW Driver

Soapy

1. Download (git clone) and build SoapySDRUtils
2. Download (git clone) and build SoapySDRPlay

CubicSDR

1. Download (git clone) and build liquid-dsp
2. Install OpenGL drivers
3. Install WxWidgets*
4. Build CubicSDR

*Note that the instructions in the video are slightly different from the default options here. The tutorial has you build the static library for WxWidgets in your ~/Dev directory. If you don't manually make this change, your install may not work.