Sunday, March 21, 2021

Hermes Lite 2 direct connect to macOS

A Hermes-Lite 2 SDR transceiver arrived a few days ago. For about $300 it's an amazing piece of equipment. A 0-38MHz direct sampling SDR that can transmit up to 5W.



Sliding the boards in to the box is quite simple except that I ran in to trouble fitting the supplied heatsink below the output transistors on the board. It took a bit of filing and grinding to get it to fit in the space below the board.

The radio connects via ethernet and that's how I initially used it with Windows. The SDR software I like the best is SDR Console. By magic it finds the radio on the network - very clever and handy if you need to operate with the radio somewhere else in the house. Direct connection ethernet to ethernet also works with SDR Console under Windows too.

My main computer is a Mac and I don't have ethernet to my office so I was pleased to find that if I simply plugged an ethernet cable from the radio to the Mac it was given an IP address of 169.254.19.221. There's not much decent SDR software for macOS but I found that SparkSDR worked quite well and found the radio without any configuration.

I should add that this is running just fine under Intel emulation on an M1 processor.

Hermes-Lite looks good so far and I'm happy that it was easy to get going on Windows, Linux and even macOS.

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for the post, am considering getting an HL2 now they are taking orders again. Will take a look at sparksdr but I’ve used gqrx forever on macos and it appears from this post it will also work: https://groups.google.com/g/hermes-lite/c/0dtmOgNLuUc.

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