rtl_fm, rtl_power, mingw, r820t

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keenerd keenerd at gmail.com
Wed Aug 28 11:55:29 UTC 2013


Hey all.

I've been shouting it all over /r/rtlsdr and ##rtlsdr, but just for
you fine folks that are only on the ML, here[1] is what I've been up
to the past week:

Overhauled scanning in rtl_fm.  This fixed a number of issues, where
either scanning did not work at all and some brokenness on OpenBSD.
It also meant giving up on the async API entirely.

Released a whole new application, rtl_power.  This is something I'd
had bouncing around on my hard drive for many months, half-unwritten
due to over-complexity.  It'll generate CSV files of arbitrarily
slow/wide/detailed FFTs.  Also a little visualization script[2] that
won't choke when you give it 50,000 columns of data.

In the process of testing rtl_power, two more things came up.  First
was windows builds.  I've got a half-finished mingw32 build script[3]
that'll let me produce windows binaries[4] on a linux host.  These
have been confirmed to actually run and probably work.  Only W32 for
now, but just because I was too lazy to build the W64 toolchain.

Second was the discovery[5] that scanning had gotten a whole lot
slower since my original experiments with rtl_fm.  85mS to retune is
unacceptably slow.  Since the r820t driver is the slowest, I started
looking into figuring out what is going on.  Still figuring that out
but I have done basic cleanups to the code (removing redundancy,
particularly around register writes) and the driver is 15% shorter
with no modifications to code behavior.

I would not mind talking to Steve or one of the other devs on IRC
about some of the more ambiguous aspects of the driver.  (Like, why
some reg writes are backed up to R828_Arry[] and others aren't.  And
is that array thread safe at all?  If not I'll have to do some very
large changes to support multiple dongles in rtl_power.)

I would really like to get these changes merged, particularly the
rtl_fm stuff because the version in the official repo is rather
bit-rotten.

-Kyle
http://kmkeen.com

[1] https://github.com/keenerd/rtl-sdr
[2] http://www.reddit.com/r/RTLSDR/comments/1ktzwi/
[3] http://kmkeen.com/tmp/mingw32.sh.txt
[4] http://kmkeen.com/tmp/rtl-sdr-mingw32-2013-08-28.zip
[5] http://www.reddit.com/r/RTLSDR/comments/1l2vlx/




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