Usable Setup For Apple Silicon…

[BMDaug]

Hey everyone, so I’ve had limited success using SDRTrunk on windows with an RTLSDR, but the windows computer I’m using is so slow that if I don’t decrease the sample rate, SDRTrunk crashes.

I have an Mac Mini M1 that I use for video editing and it’s a much more powerful than any of my PCs, but finding definitive info on what software I can run on it is difficult and even though there are some other threads on the subject, they aren’t exactly current and software releases can happen anytime.

So, I’m mainly looking for recommendations on a suite of software that can monitor a variety of modes and specifically the best option for monitoring P25 trunked systems on an M1 Mac. I’d love to do OP25 but I can’t figure out if I can even build it with the dev tools on an M1… I realize that rosetta2 will run intel builds, but if I have to build from source, what are my options?

Thanks for helping me wade the waters!!

-B

 

[maus92]

SDRTrunk supposedly supports M1 but I've never tried it,

https://github.com/DSheirer/sdrtrunk/releases/download/v0.5.0-beta.5/sdr-trunk-osx-aarch64-v0.5.0-beta5.zip

 

[BMDaug]

SDRTrunk supposedly supports M1 but I've never tried it,

https://github.com/DSheirer/sdrtrunk/releases/download/v0.5.0-beta.5/sdr-trunk-osx-aarch64-v0.5.0-beta5.zip

Dang, I totally missed that, thanks!! Downloading now.

-B

 

[jackculb]

I second SDRTrunk for Mac at least. I have it running great on Mac Mini (Intel chipset though ... not M1). You can also integrate it with your RadioReference subscription.

 

[JT-112]

SDRTrunk does indeed support Apple Silicon and it runs very nicely indeed.

 

[BMDaug]

Now I just wish SDRTrunk supported more than two channels of audio. Sometimes there are four or five simultaneous voice channels on a single site and I can only hear two at a time. My sound card has 84 channels of I/O at 96KHz sample rate and I’d like to put them to good use!!!

Also, what about more generic SDR software. I have CubicSDR installed and it works, but I’d love to have something with a waveform monitor so I can see C4FM, FM, USB, etc. waveforms… Anyone have a favorite for Apple silicone?

-B

 

[JT-112]

SDRTrunk supports literally hundreds of channels of audio, all simultaneously, given enough CPU.

What I think you're looking for are one of the packages that take all of that parallel audio and make it into a manageable thing. Put another way, there's no way you're going to be able to make heads or tails out of more than three or for actually simultaneous conversations - it'll be audio garbage.

Have a look at rdio-scanner. No, that's not a typo; google it and it's on GitHub, you should be able to run it on your M1 as well.

As far as generic SDR, try the oddly-named SDRAngel. It's not M1 native but the latest also runs on M1 well enough. It's not nearly as efficient as SDRTrunk but if you're looking for waveforms and generic demodulation, it has all of that. Also on GitHub, use the latest version. I do not like the UI and the VFO-heavy approach at all, but again, it works. As one plus, it does do PL/DPL decode on NBFM which is not common in SDR.

 

[BMDaug]

SDRTrunk supports literally hundreds of channels of audio, all simultaneously, given enough CPU.

What I think you're looking for are one of the packages that take all of that parallel audio and make it into a manageable thing. Put another way, there's no way you're going to be able to make heads or tails out of more than three or for actually simultaneous conversations - it'll be audio garbage.

Have a look at rdio-scanner. No, that's not a typo; google it and it's on GitHub, you should be able to run it on your M1 as well.

As far as generic SDR, try the oddly-named SDRAngel. It's not M1 native but the latest also runs on M1 well enough. It's not nearly as efficient as SDRTrunk but if you're looking for waveforms and generic demodulation, it has all of that. Also on GitHub, use the latest version. I do not like the UI and the VFO-heavy approach at all, but again, it works. As one plus, it does do PL/DPL decode on NBFM which is not common in SDR.

Thanks for the recommendations!! I definitely have some investigating to do now!!!

Also, that’s so weird about the hundreds of audio channels… on mine, I hear one voice channel on left, one on right, and additional channels can be seen on the interface but are not heard. If set to mono, I hear one at a time. My sound card supports up to 192 channels at 48KHz, but I only have 84 channels of A/D/A conversion. Would be really nice to be able to use eight or 16 of those channels to monitor discrete voice channels.

-B

 

[JT-112]

For "live audio" (note: there's very little actual live audio on SDRTrunk) yes the limit is R + L channels. But that's a practical limit and Denny has said there are no plans to expand it.

You need to leverage the MP3/WAV recording feature to get all of the channels in parallel. Then you need rdio-scanner (or equivalent) to put those conversations into order - it's basically a parallel to serial converter if you will.

In many ways, if you're using SDRTrunk without recording, you're losing out on a massive chunk of feature/functionality.

Note: with rdio-scanner it's perfectly legit to have many clients accessing the same instance, so if monitoring multiple discrete channels is desired, you can certainly do that.

 

[BMDaug]

For "live audio" (note: there's very little actual live audio on SDRTrunk) yes the limit is R + L channels. But that's a practical limit and Denny has said there are no plans to expand it.

You need to leverage the MP3/WAV recording feature to get all of the channels in parallel. Then you need rdio-scanner (or equivalent) to put those conversations into order - it's basically a parallel to serial converter if you will.

In many ways, if you're using SDRTrunk without recording, you're losing out on a massive chunk of feature/functionality.

Note: with rdio-scanner it's perfectly legit to have many clients accessing the same instance, so if monitoring multiple discrete channels is desired, you can certainly do that.

Really too bad there are no plans to expand live audio outside of two channels… I’ll have to explore the record feature more. I’m trying to record my SDR rig including video of the SDRTrunk interface into a single video file. I’m using an SDI video recording deck to dump the video and up to 16 channels of audio onto an SD card for later offline review. If I could just get 16 channels of audio out of SDRTrunk, I’d be able to distribute the discreet audio and the video to multiple rooms in real time and also record it to a deck via inexpensive bnc cables. Oh well!

Thanks for your help!

-B

 

[JT-112]

It sounds like you're embarking down the path I tried 2-3 years back; that path wound up in a dead end.

Please do look at recording and playback/storage on rdio-scanner. I think you'll be very happy with what it does. No, it's not real-time, but as I hinted above a lot in SDRTrunk isn't actually in real time anyways. It's near real time and getting everything recorded and put into a database is great.

You can use Quicktime to record your screen & audio, which I suspect you already knew but throwing it out there anyways.

Note that you can still decide to have some talkgroups/frequencies be sent to audio while recording others. It's not an either-or proposition.

But beyond just screen recording, SDRT also does a very very nice job of logging activity. You can log voice channels, control channels and activity. It's generally human-readable but also parsable as text at the same time.

I'd be surprised if the SDRT/rdio-scanner combo doesn't meet your needs, to be honest. Sure, some screen recording is nice for setup and troubleshooting, but past that SDRT and radio-scanner just work once you have things set up the way you want them.