Raspberry Pi Project

Installing the RTL-SDR TV Dongle Driver

There has been a sudden burst of usage over the RTL-SDR dongles as they allow average tv tuner cards to act like wide band receivers / scanners. This guide will help set up the driver for the pc card / usb stick. Run the following as root or sudo each command.

First we make sure the system is up to date

sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade

Now install all required software to build the driver

sudo apt-get install git git-core cmake libusb-1.0-0-dev build-essential libc6-dev

Clone the repository so we can compile it

git clone git://git.osmocom.org/rtl-sdr.git

Build the software

cd rtl-sdr; mkdir build; cd build cmake ../ -DINSTALL_UDEV_RULES=ON -DDETACH_KERNEL_DRIVER=ON make

Install the driver. The second command should show no result

sudo make install sudo ldconfig

Plug the USB dongle in

Some final steps

sudo ldconfig sudo cp ~/rtl-sdr/rtl-sdr.rules /etc/udev/rules.d/ sudo reboot

Once the system has rebooted test the tuner

rtl_test -t

This should result in the driver showing the availble device and its capabilities. You can now run software to use / decode signals and listen to them.

There is a build in FM tuner in the driver package....test a FM station operating at 101.1 FM

rtl_fm -M wbfm -f 101.1M | play -r 32k -t raw -e s -b 16 -c 1 -V1 -