Low Cost SDR Spectrum Analyzer and Analog

Radio Receiver Using GNU Radio, Raspberry Pi2

and SDR-RTL Dongle
E. G. Sierra∗ , G. A. Ramı́rez Arroyave∗†
∗ Universidad Católica de Colombia,† Universidad Nacional de Colombia
{egsierra, garamirez}@ucatolica.edu.co

Abstract—This paper presents the implementation and test of and models related to analog/digital modulation/demodulation
a low cost Software Defined Radio based on the Raspberry Pi2 are better understood by means of simulation, this is usually
computer, the RTL-SDR dongle radio receiver, and the GNU carried out with Simulink, Python/Scilab/Matlab/Octave code,
Radio software. Key aspects regarding installation and configura-
tion of GNU radio and RTL-SDR drivers on Raspbian Operating or similar tools. Although, recently SDR construction tools
System are addressed. The resulting device can demodulate AM like GNU radio are becoming a key enabler for teaching as
and FM signals in the frequency range from 30MHz to 1.7GHz reported in [5, 6], given the relatively easy and cheap transition
and also can meet the function of Spectrum Analyzer in moderate from simulation to real time processing of real world signals.
sensitivity demanding applications.
Index Terms—Software Defined Radio, GNU Radio, Raspberry Even though this contribution derives from a class project
Pi 2 board computer, RTL-SDR dongle, Spectrum Analyzer, at the undergraduate level, at the far end it aims to show
Analog demodulation. the potential of SDR and the proposed combination of low
cost tools not only in the engineering curriculum but also as
I. I NTRODUCTION a serious tool-set for the development of projects at various
Software defined radio - SDR is a communications sys- educative levels and even in industry start-ups. Focus herein is
tem paradigm in which many of the traditional functions of on the development of a very low cost SDR spectrum analyzer
the radio transceiver, more commonly signal processing, are with FM/AM demodulation capabilities using the Raspberry
carried out by software commands rather than by hardware Pi2 computer [7], the RTL-SDR radio receiver [8], and the
deployment either analog or digital. One of the seminal papers GNU Radio software [9].
on the topic is the celebrated work of 1995 by Mitola [1] Similar efforts are vastly reported on literature, specifically
in the context of GSM/CDMA standards for wireless mobile the SDR reception of FM signals which of course can be
communications in which alternative architectures are defined achieved in several ways, for example using FPGAs as in
for the development of SDR and the further step of Cog- [10] where a complete analysis of feed-forward and feed-back
nitive Radio - CR which even today is matter of technical alternatives for the discrete time FM signals demodulation is
discussion, especially for the difficulties that arise trying to carried out, or as in [11] where RTL-SDR dongle is used as
achieve reconfigurable radio front-ends (Antennas and filters). radio front end and a PC is used for the signal processing
Other aspects of SDR and CR like regulatory issues, service stage using simple and straightforward signal manipulations
provision, and convergence, usually overlooked in technical implemented directly in Python language, or for example as
literature are explored in [2]. in [12] where an FM receiver is implemented using the pro-
From those early days when dedicated processors and fessional grade receiver Universal Software Radio Peripheral
specific mission software where the only practical alternative - USRP by Ettus research [13] which is used to receive the
to the realization of SDR, computational power has increased radio-frequency - RF signal, down-convert and discretize it
and costs have shrunken according to the expectations [3], this and then send a digital low-pass signal to a PC where GNU
factors combined have allowed recent developments of SDR radio does the demodulation part.
and CR on general purpose hardware and software platforms A related work is presented by Danymol et al in [14], where
outside the world of military and mobile wireless industry RTL-SDR, Raspberry Pi model A and GNU radio are used in a
and hence raised interest on the topic to a broad audience. An very different way to our proposition, inasmuch as they use the
historical perspective with recent developments and current Raspberry Pi only to retransmit the RTL-SDR raw data to the
challenges of SDR can be found in [4] where the topicality of PC where GNU radio companion is running and executes the
the issue is exposed. demodulation. Another recent work reported in a blog by Back
Academy is not oblivious to this trend, traditionally, most [15] does have many common steps to our work but greatly
of the topics in communication systems and signal processing differs in the intended application as there they concentrate on
courses which require a vast set of abstract mathematical tools the recover of Mode S transponder signals from air navigation

978-1-4673-8451-3/15/$31.00 ©2015 IEEE

systems using the gr-air-modes software [16] instead of GNU
radio companion.
Also, spectrum analyzers based on similar tools (RPi2 and
RTL-SDR dongle) are reported on the Internet, for example
[17] where the author has developed his own Python code
based on Numpy [18] to plot the FFT or waterfall spectrum
of the captured signal, even though this is a very nice approach
it lacks the scalability and extended capabilities of GNU radio.
Similarly there are some reports on the Internet, most of them (a) SDR-RTL conceptual diagram
really shallow, that show the use of the gqrx software [19]
which is based on GNU radio, or the SDR-Sharp software
[20] which is a widespread SDR receiver option running on
windows platforms, in conjunction with RPi board as a signal
relay to a personal computer where processing is done.
In contrast to the aforementioned approaches this project
focuses on doing all the processing on the Raspberry Pi2
computer running a standalone version of GNU radio compan-
ion, using the RTL-SDR as signal source, this setting greatly
reduces cost and with all the possibilities enabled by GNU (b) Rpi2 conceptual diagram
radio allows with little effort many different applications by
Fig. 1: Conceptual diagram of the implemented SDR
means of simple block manipulations on its graphical interface,
or in more elaborated cases the development and use of
personalized processing blocks, hence this contribution is a
step towards autonomous SDR and CR systems that do not The RTL-SDR dongle is a very popular device among the
rely on PCs for the real time signal processing and/or for the Ham radio community, originally thought as receiver for the
execution of the cognitive algorithms involved in CR. Terrestrial version of the Digital Video Broadcast Standard
The remaining sections of this paper will discuss the design - DVB-T, the dongle has become a useful low cost RF
and setup of the components used in the project, the results front end for hobbyists and practitioners around the world
of the experiments performed, and finally a section with the since it was hacked, unfortunately no official datasheet is
conclusions and aspects of future work. available and related information has been collected by reverse
engineering, most of it is summarized in [21, 8]. The RTL-
II. D ESIGN AND PREVIOUS SETUP SDR dongle has as main characteristics a radio front based on
The realization of the SDR herein is based on a simple the RafaelMicro R820T tuner usable in the range from 24MHz
retractable monopole antenna connected to the RTL-SDR to 1.76 GHz, with an input RF port of 75Ω, noise figure
dongle that serves as receiver of the RF signals in the band of 3.5dB, a worst case sensitivity of -81.5dBm, selectable
from 0.03 to 1.7GHz and delivers digital I and Q channels intermediate frequency - IF around 4MHz; the core of the
via USB connection, the RTL-SDR is directly connected to RTL-SDR is the Realtek RTL2832U integrated circuit which
one of the USB ports of the raspberry Pi2 running Raspbian is a DVB-T Coded-OFDM demodulator, this chip is in charge
OS where a session of GNU radio demodulates the incoming of sampling and delivering digitalized bit streams via USB
signal and sends the audio raw base-band data to speakers and port, each sample is carried out with an 8 bits ADC at a
the GNU radio companion screen to a monitor via HDMI, the maximum sampling rate of 3.2MS/s, these factors greatly limit
conceptual diagram of connections is presented in fig 1 where the operation of the dongle in demanding applications. The
a high level functional view of RTL-SDR and Raspberrry Pi2 RTL-SDR was chosen for this project because of its low cost,
are drawn. no need for internal setup in contrast to professional grade
The Raspberry Pi2 computer, launched in February 2015, devices as USRP or similar, and given that our application
was chosen for this application due to its computational power only functions in receiving mode.
(it can run the full range of ARM GNU/Linux distributions Maybe the biggest limitation in this approach, and a recur-
and even is planned to run Microsoft Windows 10), and its ring one in literature, is the lack of a reconfigurable or ultra-
relative low cost (listed at 35USD in US and EU retailers, wideband antenna with good performance across the whole
price can vary depending on the retailer and country). The examined band. In this work we used a humble retractile
Raspberry Pi2 is based on the Broadcom BCM2836 System monopole that provides with a moderately good match to the
on a Chip - SoC which contains a 900MHz quad quad-core 75Ω port only in the VHF band, characterization was not done
ARM Cortex-A7 CPU and a VideoCore 4 dual-core GPU, is to this antenna.
also packed with 1 GB of RAM, Ethernet, HDMI, USB and Finally we opted for GNU radio over Raspbian for the
general purpose input and output - GPIO ports, among other Software part of this SDR, the main reason for this choice, as
conveniences. outlined in the introduction, is the easiness and the intuitive
 character of connecting blocks instead of writing code in a first Thereafter the Raspbian repositories must be updated and
approach to SDR, and also the vast opportunities for scaling then it is possible to install GNU Radio run-time and develop-
up in future developments. ment environment, this is achieved executing the commands
The steps for the configuration of each component to run listed in 3.
properly on the Raspberry Pi2, and the main issues that 1 a p t −g e t u p d a t e
can arise are depicted in the subsections that follow. This is 2 # And t h e i n s t r u c t i o n t o i n s t a l l GNU r a d i o
important because in many blogs and sites around the web 3 a p t −g e t i n s t a l l g n u r a d i o g n u r a d i o −dev
many people has their own version on how to achieve this Listing 3: Instalation of GNU radio
objective but most are inaccurate/incomplete or either assume
this previous setup is already done. At this point there were some problems previous to the
installation of GNU radio due to the locale variables given that
A. Setting up the Raspberry Pi2 the Spanish language character set is not default, if you have
The first thing to do with the Raspberry Pi2 out of the similar issues the best workaround is to install them executing
box is to set up an Operating System, several OS options the command shown in listing 4.
exist as for example those based on the Linux Kernel such as 1 a p t −g e t i n s t a l l l o c a l e s
Raspbian, Pidora, Arch Linux, OSMC, and OpenELEC, there
Listing 4: Installation of locales
are other options as RISC OS which is an operating system
designed from scratch specifically for the ARM processor, and Once GNU radio is correctly installed, the next step is to
even a version of Windows 10. Raspbian, the recommended set up the RTL-SDR drivers in order to properly use it as a
beginner’s choice from the RPi team, was chosen due to its signal source in the form of a block of GNU radio companion.
support and documentation, moreover given the availability of To do so the SDR-RTL dongle must be prevented from being
the Debian jessie packages which are supported by Raspbian recognized at boot time by the OS as a DVB-T tuner, in this
makes it feasible to run GNU radio with few complications. vein the file raspi − blacklist.conf located in the directory
A typical and easy way to install an OS on the RPi2 is by /etc/modprobe.d/ must be created/modified adding the lines
means of New Out Of the Box Software - NOOBS package of listing 5.
which comes in full and lite versions, another option is to
1 blacklist rtl2832
download the image from the Raspbian page and install it 2 blacklist r820t
manually. If you chose the manual option as done in this work 3 blacklist rtl2830
take into account that to install Raspbian it is necessary to have 4 blacklist dvb usb rtl28xxu
a micro SD card of minimum 8GB and Internet connexion Listing 5: Black list SDR-RTL
available to the RPi2, also it is important to keep in mind that
when installing Raspbian for the first time the micro SD must Finally the RTL [21] components, that allow the use of
be expanded, this setting is done in the configuration tools of RTL-SDR as a source block within GNU radio are installed
Raspbian. using the commands listed in 6.
1 r a s p i −c o n f i g 1 a p t −g e t i n s t a l l r t l −s d r gr−o s m o s d r
2 # Setup Options
3 Expand F i l e s y s t e m # Ensures t h a t a l l of
Listing 6: Installation of GNU radio RTL-SDR drivers
t h e SD c a r d s t o r a g e i s a v a i l a b l e t o t h e OS
Listing 1: First time configuration of Raspbian C. Testing RTL-SDR and GNU radio on the Raspberry Pi2
After installing Raspbian and rebooting the Raspberry the In figure 2 the final assembly except the monitor is shown.
next step is to install GNU radio, and the drivers for the SDR- After the set up stage described above, the first test to prove
RTL dongle. everything behaves as expected was to use the built-in func-
tionalities of the RTL-SDR library which can be executed from
B. Installing GNU radio and its dependencies on the Rasp- the Raspbian command line and comprises a wide-band FM
berry Pi2 radio receiver, and a command to test the dongle’s operating
The steps described herein are based on [15], all commands frequencies and sample rate.
must be executed as superuser, in the first place the packets The first is the RTL FM program which can initialize the
of jessie must be downloaded, this is done by editing the RTL dongle, tune a specific frequency, and send the decoded
sources.list that is a text archive found in the directory audio to a file or to an available player, also callable from
/etc/apt/, to do so simply add the line shown in listing 2 the command line, as the alsa aplay or the sox play. The
in the mentioned archive and save changes. Take care and do second is the RTL SDR program that makes available the
not modify the rest of the file. raw I-Q data for extensive analysis. For example with the
option ’-t’ gives the possible tuning range, whereas the option
1 deb h t t p : / / a r c h i v e . r a s p b i a n . o r g / r a s p b i a n j e s s i e
main ’-s’ allows to define the sampling rate and verify if there are
dropped samples. These commands are used as presented in
Listing 2: Installation of jessie packages
code fragment 7.
 the literature these are strongly discouraged as they present
serious lags when used in the present hardware configuration,
moreover they will be discontinued in the future releases of
GNU radio.
The block WBFM receive in charge of executing the FM
quadrature signal demodulation can be replaced by other
options as a properly developed C++/Python detector, for
example using the feed-forward and feedback architectures
exposed in [10] but this is subject of a more deep treatment of
GNU radio which is beyond the scope of this first approach.
With the setup of fig 2 and the block diagram of fig 3
running on it, the allocated bandwidth to the commercial FM
Fig. 2: Hardware Assembly radio was swept, and the available stations were easily tuned
and demodulated with acceptable sound quality as subjectively
compared with a commercial radio receiver.
1 r t l f m −f 9 8 . 5 e6 −M wbfm −s 200000 −r 48000 − | Figure 4 shows the received power spectrum along with
a p l a y −r 48 k −f S16 LE the spectrogram in the frequency range from 90 to 91.5MHz
2 r t l t e s t −t
3 r t l t e s t −s 3 . 2 e6 where there can be appreciated the presence of two stations
at 90.4 and 90.9 MHz, both about 20dB above the noise floor
Listing 7: Test of RTL-SDR on RPi2
of the receiver.
When this straightforward test is executed the RPi2 becomes B. Comparison of the RTL based SDR sensitivity with a
a simple specific mission SDR dedicated to receive, decode, Spectrum Analyzer
and play FM signals, as its processing capacities are more
than enough for this application audio quality is really good In the second test performed the proposed assembly is
and hence mono output can be clearly listened. Nevertheless, compared to the available Gw Instek spectrum analyzer ’GSP
with the rtl test command option ’-t’ there was a compatibility 810’ which spans a frequency range from 150kHz to 1GHz,
problem related to the R820T tuner inside the RTL-SDR and with resolution bandwidths - RBW of: 3K, 30k, 220k, and
frequency sweep was not available to characterize the tune 4MHz, this instrument also has the capability of demodulate
range of the receiver, while the ’-s’ option allowed to observe WBFM signals of 120kHz frequency deviation.
that the maximum sample rate that does not drop samples is The first difference that appears obvious is the frequency
2.8MS/s. span that favors the low cost assembly by a 1.7:1 factor on
the upper band, moreover on the lower portion of the spectrum,
III. R ESULTS there is a clear disadvantage for the RTL-SDR which can not
After setting up all the hardware and software components, go below 30MHz whereas a lab test equipment should be well
the next step consists of running GNU radio companion, the under this value. This of course is a limitation of the radio front
graphical interface of GNU radio, on the RPi2 board with the used, based on the RTL-SDR that is designed to work in the
aim of directly build, edit, and execute SDRs by a simple VHF-UHF portion of the electromagnetic spectrum and not as
block diagram manipulation. a high sensitivity ultra-wideband instrumentation receiver, so
Two main tests were performed, in the first place the for low frequency applications another tuner should be used.
listening and ”visualization” of commercial FM radio stations A direct comparison was performed in the allocated band
was performed and in second case a comparison to a test to commercial FM stereo radio, results are shown in figure 5,
laboratory spectrum analyzer was carried out in different here can be watched that the curves behave in a very similar
frequency bands. way, despite the sensitivity difference.
A second test was performed in other frequency bands
A. FM listening to compare the frequency span of receivers, among others,
A simple radio receiver was built in GNU radio companion carriers were chosen in 800 MHz where SDR equipment can
as shown in figure 3. There can be seen how the RTL-SDR is detect a carrier only 10dBm above its noise level, and also in
used as signal source, and FFT based frequency and waterfall the digital terrestrial television - TDT band of 480 MHz where
sinks are used to fulfill the spectrum analyzer functions, a the carrier is detected but due to the previously mentioned
standard Wide-Band FM receiver of GNU radio is employed limitations only a 2MHz portion of spectrum can be seen.
to detect FM modulated signals, miscellaneous blocks are Results around 880 MHz GSM band are shown in figure 6
employed to filter and resample signals. showing agreement in both instruments.
Some remarks regarding this diagram implementation are Finally with the aim of comparing the noise sensitivity of
worth, the use of QT GUI sink blocks is advised given both receivers a central frequency of 150MHz was chosen, due
their superior performance compared to WX GUI based ones, to the fact that few interference was present in near bands.
even if the second ones are widely used in examples around There was seen that the analyzer can resolve signal levels of
 Fig. 3: GNU radio companion block diagram of simple Spectrum Analyzer and FM detector

Comparison of measurements in the FM radio band

−30
Analyzer
RTL−SDR Rpi2 GNUradio
−40

−50

Power (dBm)

−60

−70

−80

−90

−100
88 90 92 94 96 98 100 102 104 106 108
frequency (MHz)

Fig. 5: Analyzer vs Raspberry

automatically installing the applications and its dependencies

on RPi2.
The use of GNU radio has proven very useful in the learning
and understanding of digital processing of communication
signals, with the additional advantage of being of GPL license
and hence maintaining costs low related to other considered
options. Likewise, the use of the Raspberry Pi2 computer has
proven being powerful enough to run GNU radio companion
Fig. 4: Portion of the received Power spectrum in the FM radio while also executing the real time demodulation of FM signals
band and allowing the visualization of FFT power spectral density
and waterfall frequency-time representation. Also, although
sensitivity is poor compared to laboratory/professional grade
approximately -100dBm whereas the RTL module has a noise measurement devices, the results achieved with the SDR-RL
immunity about -83dBm. receiver are more than satisfying and prove a great value for
its cost.
IV. C ONCLUSIONS
This project has shown the realization of a completely stan-
It is evident that installing GNU radio and RTL-SDR drivers dalone SDR based on public domain and low cost tools. Many
on Raspberry Pi have many steps and hence is prone to other applications should use similar setups of hardware and
errors which affect the performance of the hardware and software, with further improvements more complex systems
developed applications, an easy and strongly encouraged way can be realized. Hardware extensions as the use of USRP are
to avoid this errors should be the creation of a Linux script for suggested to achieve transceivers that allow the simultaneous
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