Re: GNU Radio on Raspberry Pi 4?

[Albin Stigö]

Dan,

I can't comment on your particular flowgraph but I can tell you that you will get a significant speed-up if you build volk and GNURadio from source (and maybe fftw) as this enables all sorts off optimizations not in the ppa for compatability reasons.

If you decide to go down this route I recommend you keep your root filesystem on an ssd attached via usb3 and increase your swap file size to max.

Albin SM6WJM

On Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 23:40 Dan Romanchik KB6NU <cwgeek@kb6nu.com> wrote:

Has anyone successfully run GNU Radio on a Pi 4? I recently purchased an RTL-SDR dongle and thought it would be fun to experiment a little with GNU Radio and learn something about SDR.

A couple of days ago, I fired up GNU Radio, and after having some trouble figuring out how to get the audio sink to talk to the Pi, I downloaded VE6EY's FM receiver flow graph. The flow graph runs, but the Pi 4 just doesn't seem to have enough horsepower to run it in real time. The audio is slow and distorted.

Thinking that it might be the WX widgets slowing down the program, I first deleted the FFT display widgets, then converted the WX slider controls to QT range controls. Neither had any effect on how well the flow graph ran.

GQRX and CubicSDDR seem to work just fine. At least with both of them, I'm able to receive FM broadcast and NOAA weather station. But, maybe the PI4 just doesn't have enough horsepower to run GNU Radio? If so, that's kind of disappointing.

73! <—ham radio lingo for “best regards"

Dan KB6NU
CW Geek, Ham Radio Instructor
Author of the "No Nonsense" amateur radio license study guides
Read my ham radio blog at http://www.kb6nu.com