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@MartGro
Last active February 12, 2023 08:44
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Getting the RSP1 to run under Ubuntu 20.04
  1. Get the Driver

Download the driver from the following link:

https://www.sdrplay.com/dlfinishs/

  1. Follow the Instructions of CubicSDR

For instructions on how to build CubicSDR on Linux, refer to the following link:

https://github.com/cjcliffe/CubicSDR/wiki/Build-Linux SoapySDRPlay Plugin

For the SoapySDRPlay Plugin, use the following link for guidance:

https://github.com/pothosware/SoapySDRPlay3/wiki

  1. Strange Driver Issue

There may be a strange driver issue where the loaded drivers are not the ones you want for CubicSDR. In this case, blacklisting the drivers is necessary. For more information, refer to the following link:

https://github.com/f4exb/sdrangel/wiki/Note-on-SDRPlay-RSP1-on-Linux

Most distributions will load the msi2500 driver by default, which will interfere with the direct access that SDRangel makes with libmirisdr (and libusb). This may result in the SDRPlay appearing in the list of devices, but failing to start.

To check if your system has loaded device drivers for the SDR module, use the dmesg command. The output will indicate if the loaded drivers are incompatible with the binary-only driver.

If the output shows that the msi2500 driver is loaded, edit the /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf file and add the following lines:

blacklist sdr_msi3101 blacklist msi001 blacklist msi2500

Then, unplug the SDRPlay, remove the offending modules, and restart the module loading service:

lua

sudo rmmod msi001 msi2500 sudo systemctl restart systemd-modules-load.service

In Case of Error Probing Device

In case your SDRPlay dongle is connected but you still get the error message Probe device driver=sdrplay Error probing device: no available RSP devices found, follow the same steps as described above to blacklist the drivers and remove the offending modules.

As a last step, unplug and replug your SDRPlay dongle and try to probe it again with SoapySDRUtil.

  1. Get it to interface with python:

I was encountering the same error when trying to import SoapySDR in a conda environment. I solved it by adding the path to the library to the conda environment.

conda activate my_env
conda develop /usr/local/lib/python3.8/site-packages <-- path to the library. This is shown when running cmake

Then it works for me. I had to install conda-build beforehand (conda install conda-build)

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