Monday, February 16, 2026

Generating sideband to transmit on a HackRF

While working on my C port of FreeDV RADE1 I wanted a reliable radio signal to test with. While I have off air recordings from the FreeDV GUI app I thought it would be nice to generate my own files to transmit with the HackRF Portapack Mayhem which can record to C16 files and play them back. There's a TXT file with each recording that specifies the sample rate and output frequency.

I've made a python utility that can read a WAV file recording and produce C16 sideband. Here's how it sounds.


The code is pretty short so I've published it as a gist on GitHub.

The HackRF is a wonderful tool for radio experimentation. I'm using the standalone Mayhem but it works just as well from a computer via USB with hackrf_transfer.

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