Although I had a laptop set up with everything using the build-gnuradio script plus manual installs of applications, I also needed to have it up and running on a second laptop.

This time around I used the more up to date method of installation provided by the GNURadio developers, the PyBOMBS application. As described, this will build GNURadio, dependencies and out of tree projects. It also lets you keep on top of updates for projects so should be good going forward.

The install of GNURadio worked without a hitch as did installing the hackrf tools with “./pybombs install hackrf”.

Installing GQRX initially failed with an error as described here:

/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lboost_system-mt
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lboost_program_options-mt
collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status
make: *** [gqrx] Error 1
ERROR:root:PyBOMBS Make step failed for package (gqrx) please see bash output above for a reason (hint: look for the word Error)

And as in the solution there, removing BOOST_SUFFIX=-mt from recipes/gqrx.lwr allowed it to compile.

On starting the PyBOMBS installed GQRX I was pleasantly surprised to see there’s now a Bookmark function to store frequencies:

Also with the new install you don’t have to select “No limits” in GQRX to view under 30mhz as with my older GQRX/gr-osmosdr on the other laptop. The performance under 30Mhz isn’t going to be great but as described by Michael Ossmann in a talk at Defcon here it can go beyond it’s original specification which is nice 🙂