Freq. Scanner Software (MacOS)

[cbcjock]

Hi All,

A recent arrival in SDR but I come from a lifetime spent in Icom gear. My current set up is MacOS but I am lucky to have an older Windows machine to use the SDRs on.

That said, are there any basic scanner packages for MacOS? I'm aware of CubicSDR but it doesn't have the plugins available that SDR# has, so true frequency scanning is not available. Likewise, it seems to run hot on my machine and the current build is creeping up on a year since release.

Long story short, any recommendations for a native MacOS scanner app?

 

[gdaykoloa]

Other than CubicSDR and GQRX, you won't find too much that works natively on macOS. I'm in the same situation as yourself, and pretty much just make due with running Parallels and having Linux or a Windows VM to run specific software (at a performance cost) there.

I've also written simple shell scripts that talk directly to my HackRF to pretend to be a bit of a scanner, but, that only works for conventional frequencies without any digital or trunking going on (the way I've done it).

Some people have had luck with running certain packages via WINE, but that, too, can be a bit messy.

I still use GQRX and CubicSDR with my various SDR devices, and it does work well, but, no, you won't get any of the plugins and extra features that some of the Windows packages have, sadly.

 

[grixelle]

There's not much but it seems to improve lately. SigDigger is an active project on github and has a Mac dmg available. sigdigger If you're using RTL-SDR there is an issue on Mac OSX but there is a work-around to get it working with RTL-SDR.

https://github.com/BatchDrake/SigDigger/issues/103#issuecomment-626335832

My personal perspective is you should buy a cheap PC and run Windows 10. While possible to do DSD, FSK, etc on Mac it requires building a lot of apps from source and running them from the Mac Terminal. And I don't recommend using either Bootcamp or Parallels. There are audio issues with Parallels that make decoding digital radio challenging, and Bootcamp drivers are not always the most stable (lots of crashes and freeze-ups).