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gnuradio

Build a radio out of signal-processing blocks instead of hardware

What it does

A signal-processing framework and a graphical editor for it. You connect blocks -- sources, filters, demodulators, decoders, sinks -- into a flow graph, and it runs as a real-time radio. The blocks are C++ and Python; the editor, GNU Radio Companion, generates a Python program you can read and edit.

Why you would want it

Every SDR application is a flow graph someone else already drew. This is where you draw your own, and it is the difference between using the modes somebody wrote a program for and demodulating the signal in front of you. It is also the substrate: gr-satellites, gr-air-modes, gr-rds and the SIGINT tooling are all GNU Radio modules, so this is what they load into.

Before it will work

A radio to feed it -- gr-osmosdr or SoapySDR provide the hardware sources for RTL-SDR, HackRF, Airspy and the rest, and neither is pulled in automatically. Real-time sample rates are CPU work; a wide flow graph on a slow machine underruns rather than slowing down.

How it installs

  • apt: gnuradio
  • Mint 22.3 is a major release behind at 3.10.9.2 where every other target carries 3.10.12.0 (measured 2026-08-28). That matters more here than elsewhere: out-of-tree modules are compiled against a specific GNU Radio ABI, so a module built for 3.10.12 will not load under 3.10.9. Anything in this catalog that depends on gnuradio inherits that constraint.

Known problems

Out-of-tree modules are version-locked to the GNU Radio they were compiled against, and a mismatch shows up as a block that will not import rather than as a version error -- this is the single most common GNU Radio problem and it is why SCOPE.md puts third-party modules behind a working source backend and a pin database rather than in 1.0. Flow graphs written for 3.7 or 3.8 need porting for 3.10; the syntax changed and the errors are not obvious.

Keeping it current

  • probe: apt policy
  • strategy: apt_upgrade

Where to get help with the software itself

The GNU Radio project. Mailing list, matrix chat and extensive tutorials linked from the site; the guided tutorials are the right starting point and are better than most software's.

Source: catalog/packages/gnuradio.yaml