Using the RTL Dongle and SDR on Apple Silicon

It's been a few years since I played with a software defined radion (SDR). I have one of the inexpensive RTL dongles and on Intel based Macs or Windows and Linux machines, there's a variety of SDR applications you can use. I tried a few but they kept crashing on me so I settled on gqrx.

Gqrx is built for Intel CPUs but it runs OK under Rosetta 2 on my M1 MacBook Air.

To install Rosetta 2 from a terminal prompt type this and hit Enter:

    $ softwareupdate --install-rosetta --agree-to-license

(Note: The dollar sign is the prompt, don't type it.)

Then install gqqrx using Homebrew. If you don't have Homebrew installed you'll need to do so first.

Install Homebrew:

    $ /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Install gqrx:

    $ brew install --cask gqrx

When you first start it up you'll need to select your device on this screen:

After it starts check this out for instructions on getting started.

My RTL dongle has a USB A connection so I needed to use a USB A-to-C adapter to connect it to the Mac. For an antenna I used my Comet GP-3 2M/70cm mounted on my chimney.

2M and 70cm were quiet in my area last night but I was able to receive the local NOAA Weather station clearly:

And the FM broadcast spectrum was full. Here it is tuned to WMMR Philadelphia:

I'm thinking about picking up one of the receivers from SDRplay which in conjunction with their software, which is built for Apple Silicon, should perform better and be easier to setup. The SDRplay also receives a wider spectrum than the cheap dongles (which are good for the money).