Installing GNURadio - AndrewBIS/kicksat GitHub Wiki

Thankfully the latest version of Ubuntu has a recent enough version of GNURadio for our purposes (3.6.1 at the time of this writing). The following steps will detail how to get a working GNURadio setup for receiving Sprite signals. I started with a fresh install of Ubuntu, but any Ubuntu-based distro (Kubunut, Xubuntu, Mint, etc.) should work just fine.

Install Prerequisites

Open a terminal, copy and paste, then run the following command:

sudo apt-get install gnuradio gnuradio-dev cmake git libboost-all-dev libusb-1.0-0 libusb-1.0-0-dev libfftw3-dev swig python-numpy

You'll be asked to enter your administrator password and told about some additional packages that will be installed to cover dependencies. Hit enter and wait a few minutes while the necessary packages are downloaded and installed.

Install RTL-SDR Driver

Once you've installed the prerequisite packages, it's time to install the driver that allows us to use the USB radio dongle. The following command will download and install the latest RTL-SDR driver:

cd ~ && git clone --progress git://git.osmocom.org/rtl-sdr.git && cd rtl-sdr && mkdir build && cd build && cmake .. -DINSTALL_UDEV_RULES=ON && make && sudo make install

Install RTL-SDR GNURadio Block

This will install a block in GNURadio companion allowing you to use the RTL-SDR driver from GNURadio's GUI editor. Copy and paste, then execute the following in your terminal:

cd ~ && git clone --progress git://git.osmocom.org/gr-osmosdr && cd gr-osmosdr && mkdir build && cd build && cmake .. && make && sudo make install

Install Sprite GNURadio Blocks

Now were going to install the Sprite reciever blocks for GNURadio. Same drill as before...

cd ~ && git clone --progress git://github.com/zacinaction/kicksat && cd kicksat/GroundStation/GNURadio/gr-sprite && mkdir build && cd build && cmake .. && make && sudo make install && sudo ldconfig

Add GNURadio Config File

The last step is to add a config file telling GNURadio where to look for the new blocks we just installed. The following command will do this for you:

mkdir ~/.gnuradio && echo -e "[grc]\nlocal_blocks_path=/usr/local/share/gnuradio/grc/blocks" >> ~/.gnuradio/config.conf

That's it! You should now have a working GNURadio installation.