SDR Scanner on Mac

[ossendryver]

Hey all,

I want to know if there is anyway of installing a SDR radio on a mac that allows the software to autoselect a frequency that is actively transmitting?

Thanks

 

[br0adband]

To the best of my knowledge the only functional SDR software on the OSX/macOS platform aka Macs would be Gqrx at this time. There could be something else, and you could potentially run Windows-based software in a Windows virtual machine using VMware Fusion, Parallels, or VirtualBox, but for now Gqrx is the one package I know for a fact does work. You can find more info about GQRX here:

Gqrx SDR – Open source software defined radio by Alexandru Csete OZ9AEC

There is a .dmg installer image located with a link off the download page:

Download Gqrx SDR – Gqrx SDR

It's fairly simple to set up as long as you read the documentation carefully and pay attention to what you're doing.

Now as for autoselecting a frequency as in locking onto the strongest one directly or even a scanning-like plugin capability I don't believe that functionality is part of the program - Gqrx is rather limited and designed to be operated "by hand" meaning manually and doesn't offer much in terms of automation but that's always something that might happen as development continues.

Good luck...

 

[EricCottrell]

Hello,

CubicSDR supports Windows, Linux, and Mac. I have only used it on Windows and Linux. I do not think it supports auto-search or scanning.
CubicSDR | Cross-Platform and Open-Source Software Defined Radio Application

The closest I know to what you are asking for are plugins that were developed for SDRSharp. This is a C# program using dot Net.
SDR# Frequency Scanner Plugin Updated - rtl-sdr.com

It might be possible to run SDRSharp using Mono. There has been some success with Linux. I do not know if any other Mac users have tried this.
OSX | Mono

Searching around some more I came across this post that said it was possible, but not anymore. Maybe there is another method.
Installing SDR# on OSX - rtl-sdr.com

73 Eric

 

[br0adband]

I feel like an idiot for saying this but there was a point earlier this year when I had SDR# running in Mono under OSX (before they changed over to macOS that is, not that it's relevant to this topic at hand). I completely forgot about it and will say I'm not sure what the state of development is at this moment but it did work given some limitations. The information that I used to get it up and running can be found at the link Eric provided above at the RTL-SDR blog website.

And yes it did work well enough I suppose, I didn't get into using a bunch of plugins like the scanning one (either of them) so I can't speak for whether or not it will work in that respect.