GNURadio fun...

I have a had a real hard time trying to get GNURadio installed. The distro failed every time when running gnuradio-companion. This isn’t GNURadio’s fault, it may well be because my Ubuntu desktop has been upgraded a few times via dist-upgrade without it being a fresh install. Perhaps there is some old crud left in there even though I tried my best to remove all old versions of GNURadio and associated files and folders. After constant errors no matter what I tried it seems that my Ubuntu 18.04 installation somehow grabs GNURadio compiled against a previous boost library 1.58. So I resorted to the pybombs method which has installed a functioning GNURadio-companion despite errors with apache-thrift. Sadly, when installing gr-iio via pybombs it failed, again seemingly trying to refer to boost 1.58, rather than the 1.65 that the 18.04 distro has.

So… I purged libboost and grabbed the 1.58 code from sourceforge and set it off building. There are lots and lots of warnings but it did compile and install. Trying again to install gr-iio failed - it seemed to try to install boost itself and then whinged that the version is wrong. All deleted and purged again, still using the pybombs method and making it compile everything rather than installing the binaries. This time the uhd cod went in with no errors and GNURadio-companion runs ok except it has no rtl-sdr. Installing RTL-SDR did not help as a source file is missing… Installing the gr-iio package for the pluto also worked fine, and the FMComms block is there along with others such as PlutoSDR al categorised under Industrial IO.

After downloading an example .grc file that some kind person put on the web it works! I can see 70cm and see the result of a cq test call. Much to learn yet but at least the pluto is working in receive with GNURadio.

As an aside, while waiting for pybombs to sort everything out - and it took ages on uhd - I installed sdrangel which has a .deb package that works with Ubuntu 18.04. After figuring out that it installs itself into /opt rather than /usr I fired it up with the pluto attached and I can make the pluto receive on 70cm.

I’m sure the lesson here is sort out your Linux installation rather than continually fiddling with it like I have. When I get some time I plan a fresh installation of 18.04 and getting GNURadio from the distro to see if it works that way.