funcube-dongle¶
FUNcube Dongle Pro and Pro+ — AMSAT-UK's receive-only satellite SDR
Vendor: AMSAT-UK / Howse
Status: supported — the identifiers and setup recipe are believed correct.
Not maintainer-verified: nobody on this project has run this hardware yet. The two facts are recorded separately on purpose (D-027) — a correct recipe and a tested device are different claims.
What it is¶
A receive-only SDR in a USB dongle, built by AMSAT-UK to fund and receive the FUNcube educational satellites. Two generations: the Pro (64-1700 MHz) and the Pro+ (150 kHz-240 MHz and 420 MHz-1.9 GHz, with SAW filtering the Pro lacks). To Linux it is a composite device — samples arrive as a standard USB audio class capture device, and tuning happens over a HID control interface.
What you can do with it¶
Receive satellite telemetry — its design purpose — plus anything else in range of a 192 kHz-wide receiver with good front-end filtering: weather satellites, and VHF/UHF ham traffic. ADS-B is out of reach — not for frequency (the Pro reaches 1090 MHz) but because its sample bandwidth is only 96/192 kHz where ADS-B needs about 2 MHz. The audio-class design means any SDR program that can read a soundcard can use it, with gr-funcube or qthid doing the tuning.
Setup¶
Install gr-funcube; its udev rule grants world access to both models' control interfaces, so no group membership is required. The dongle appears as an ALSA capture device for the sample stream. If raw /dev/hidraw access fails, check which USB bus the dongle landed on — the shipped rule's hidraw stanzas only match bus 1 (see the gr-funcube package entry).
Known problems¶
The two generations are configured by different tools and blocks — a Pro+ is not a Pro with wider coverage, and software written for one does not tune the other. Sample rate is fixed by the audio interface (96 kHz Pro, 192 kHz Pro+), which no setting changes.
How it identifies itself¶
| USB id | What | Confirmed | Node |
|---|---|---|---|
04d8:fb56 |
FUNcube Dongle Pro (the original) | yes | hid |
04d8:fb31 |
FUNcube Dongle Pro+ (the second generation, with preselector filters) | yes | hid |
⚠ 04d8:fb56 is not unique to this device (shared_across_products; also used by: qthid-fcd-controller). On the generated ambiguity list because two packages ship rules for the pair — gr-funcube and qthid-fcd-controller. Both are tools for this same device, so the sharing is an artifact of counting packages rather than products: the pair does identify a FUNcube Dongle Pro. Recorded because the loader requires the listing be acknowledged, and the block is the honest place to say the listing overstates it.
⚠ 04d8:fb31 is not unique to this device (shared_across_products; also used by: qthid-fcd-controller). Same shape as the Pro's entry: listed because gr-funcube and qthid-fcd-controller both ship rules for it, and both are tools for this device. An artifact of the package count, not a shared chip — the pair identifies a FUNcube Dongle Pro+.
Software that makes it useful¶
Upstream: https://www.funcubedongle.com/