Tuesday, January 16, 2018

Running an SDR "spy server" for the Airspy HF+ on Raspberry Pi


One of the great features of the Airspy devices and the SDR# software is the ability to remote control a receiver that is running on a "spyserver". I thought I'd run it up on a Raspberry Pi here.

I followed the simple instructions for an ARM32 CPU but immediately got the dreaded “`GLIBCXX_3.4.21′ not found” error when I tried to run ./spyserver.

Unfortunately the source code to spyserver doesn't seem to be available and the binary has been built against a pre-release version of ARM Linux. The instructions to update to the required libraries are here and thankfully that worked for me (but takes some time to do all the updates).

I port forwarded 5555 to the outside and now I can connect remotely and use the receiver. The first user gets full control of frequency and others can listen nearby. I've got to say, connecting to and using a spyserver works really well. There's a small list of public servers here. I can recommend a very low noise location in NZ at sdr://rtlsdrblog.hopto.org.

It would be great if the protocol and spyserver reference code could be open sourced. You can also share an rtl-sdr device via this protocol as well.

No comments: