Re: SDR's?

From a fellow ham thanks for the information.

On another note anyone tried to build Allstarlink on OpenBSD?  If not any other repeater controller software?

73
diana
KI5PGJ

On December 13, 2024 1:18:58 PM MST, Paul Tagliamonte <paultag@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Dec 12, 2024 at 10:16:34PM -0000, Stuart Henderson wrote:
Currently using a HAM specific Linux distro but I'd like to return to
OpenBSD.

I don't have one but I believe hackrf has a bit of support. There
are a couple of other relevant things in ports, however in general
you're probably better off sticking to Linux for this. SDRs usually
want userland support for USB devices and that doesn't work well in
OpenBSD.

I have a bucket of SDRs i've tried on OpenBSD. The rtl-sdr does work
under OpenBSD, but the USB stack is particularly fiddly which is a
recurring source of weird hard-to-debug issues.

I've tried a rtl, hackrf, usrp (b210, b200), airspyhf, and a few others,
and the only which I had any meaningful luck with was the rtl. I
wouldn't suggest this route except in so far as you're looking to
improve the codebase of the SDR libraries or brave enough to work on the
OpenBSD USB stack.

I sent a patch to USRP upstream that fixed building from source a while
back, so the USRP library *can* work well enough to get metadata back
from the radios, but it won't actually work because (I think?) of the
usb transfer code.

I posted a while back[1] after digging in a bit to what was causing the
USB issues. I did not isolate the cause, nevermind fix it.

I still process some RF data on an OpenBSD (mostly for fun/sport) -- but
the only reliable way is to run the radio on a Linux box, and serve IQ
over the network. OpenBSD's network handling code compared to the USB
handling code is a lot more ... robust.

Fondly,
  paultag
  K3XEC


[1]: <ZCHKm9h7YYQiE4Uc@nysos>