Raspberry Pi 2 and RTL-SDR into an amateur radio transceiver

Raspberry Pi 2 and RTL-SDR into an amateur radio transceiver

It turns your Raspberry Pi 2 and RTL-SDR into an amateur radio transceiver! (Released under BSD license.)

ha7ilm/qtcsdr

qtcsdr
qtcsdr makes a ham transceiver out of your Raspberry Pi 2 and RTL-SDR!

Click on the video to see it in action:



qtcsdr

Big thanks to Evariste, F5OEO for rpitx that makes this possible.

What you will need to make it work

• You will need an RTL-SDR dongle which will be the SDR receiver.
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• You will need a Raspberry Pi 2, which will be the SDR transmitter.
• With the help of the fantastic rpitx project, we can transmit AM/NFM/WFM/LSB/USB on the "GPIO 18" (number 12) pin of the Pi (see pinout over here).
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• You will need a proper band-pass filter for the transmitter output, see the explanation below.
• Soon you will be able to purchase the QRPi filter + amplifier board that was featured at TAPR DCC 2015, see details here. (You can also build your own filter circuit based on HOWTOs found on the web.)
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• UPDATE: We made some more measurements, and we found that although NFM/WFM works as expected, the AM/SSB modes need a much higher level of filtering as the PWM-based amplitude modulation implemented in rpitx affects the spectrum even more. Currently work is being done on improving both the software and the hardware.
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• To transmit, you will need an USB audio card, because the Raspberry Pi doesn't have a microphone input.
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• You may or may not need an external powered USB hub to supply enough current to the audio card and the RTL-SDR.
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• As the OS for the Raspberry Pi 2, you will need at least Raspbian Jessie (09/2015) as it has the Qt5 packages in its repos (or you would have to manually download Qt5 binaries or build Qt5 from source).