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pihpsdr

Operator program for OpenHPSDR transceivers -- ANAN, Hermes Lite 2 and their kin

What it does

piHPSDR is the operating program for transceivers that speak the OpenHPSDR protocols, 1 and 2, over Ethernet: Apache Labs' ANAN radios, the Hermes Lite 2, and the older Hermes, Angelia, Orion and Metis boards. It finds the radio on the local network and gives you the whole panel -- band and mode, receivers with a panadapter and waterfall, filters, noise reduction, AGC, transmit with a microphone or CW keyer, PureSignal predistortion on the boards that have it, and CAT over TCP so another program can follow the radio. The DSP is the WDSP library, vendored in its tree and built with it. It transmits. These are transceivers, and piHPSDR keys them: press MOX, TUNE or the microphone's PTT, or let a digital-mode program key it over CAT, and the radio emits RF on the frequency shown. A licence and the band plan apply. Installing it transmits nothing, and nothing is keyed until you have found a radio, started it and pressed one of those.

Why you would want it

The catalog carries gr-hpsdr, which gives an HPSDR radio to GNU Radio as a source and a sink and leaves you to build the radio around it. This is a program to operate one with. On Windows the same radios run Thetis or PowerSDR; piHPSDR is the native Linux and Raspberry Pi program, and upstream's README lists a client-server mode for running the radio from a second machine, transmit included. quisk is the other transceiver program here; it speaks to SoapySDR devices and a few others, not to HPSDR protocol 2.

Before it will work

An OpenHPSDR radio on the same Ethernet segment as the computer: discovery is by broadcast, so a router between them hides the radio. Audio comes from PulseAudio or PipeWire's Pulse layer. For CAT from other programs it has a TCP server that emulates a Kenwood TS-2000 (upstream's rigctl.c), and a TCI server. No station file: the settings live in its own menus.

How it installs

  • git (make) — https://github.com/dl1ycf/pihpsdr at v3.0 (commit 2552f77f123d7aff37d3e7e04a0394254f76a817)
  • build dependencies: build-essential, pkg-config, git, libfftw3-dev, libgtk-3-dev, libasound2-dev, libpulse-dev, libssl-dev, libcurl4-openssl-dev, libusb-1.0-0-dev, libi2c-dev, libgpiod-dev, libopus-dev, libminiupnpc-dev, libsqlite3-dev, libwebsockets-dev, zlib1g-dev
  • the project's build system has no install rule; the binaries listed below are copied into the prefix instead
  • Built on 2026-10-01 in a rootless debian:13 container the way this block runs it -- make -j 2 in the checkout as an unprivileged user, with exactly the build_depends above: exit 0, 35 s wall, 216 MiB peak for the largest process, 23 compiler warnings (14 of them WDSP's "only SSE and SSE2" notice) and no errors. The executable is 21.7 MB and links GTK 3, FFTW, PulseAudio, ALSA, libcurl, libwebsockets, libgpiod and Opus. The build dependencies came to 411 packages and about 1.0 GB on a bare debian:13 image, most of it GTK's development stack. Ubuntu 24.04 and Mint carry libgpiod 1.6, which the Makefile builds against through its GPIOV1 path: built that way in an ubuntu:24.04 container the same day, exit 0, 37 s, 218 MiB peak.

Binaries this produces:

  • pihpsdr

Known problems

The first start takes a long time and must not be interrupted. It computes FFTW "wisdom" for every transform size WDSP uses and writes ~/.config/pihpsdr/wdspWisdom00; the window says "Do not close window until wisdom plans are completed". In the container measurement on 2026-10-01 that took 54 minutes at the lowest CPU priority while another build ran beside it, and an interrupted run starts again from the beginning. Later starts read the file and take seconds. Settings live in ~/.config/pihpsdr (it changes into that directory on start), one set per account. SoapySDR is not built in: upstream's Makefile leaves it off by default and this build keeps the default, so a HackRF or an RTL-SDR does not appear here -- use quisk, gqrx-sdr or sdrpp for those. GPIO and I2C controller support is compiled in for the Raspberry Pi and does nothing on a laptop; it logs "could not open /dev/i2c-1" and carries on. What was measured: built on Debian 13, started under a virtual display with no radio (wisdom, then a discovery that found nothing), and started again beside upstream's own radio simulator, hpsdrsim, built from the same tree, which it discovered over protocol 1 and protocol 2. The device dialog drew black under the virtual display. Not measured: any real radio, a receive or transmit session, audio, CAT, PureSignal, the client-server link, or a build on any target but Debian 13 and Ubuntu 24.04 (the arm64 build is upstream's main platform and has not been run here).

Keeping it current

  • probe: github tags (dl1ycf/pihpsdr)
  • strategy: rebuild
  • DL1YCF tags releases a few times a year (v2.5 2025-02, v2.6 2025-10, v2.7 2026-02, v3.0 2026-06) and keeps a branch per release for fixes (Rel-3.0, head 2026-09-02). Move the tag and its commit together, and re-read the default branch's head for liveness (D-032), not GitHub's activity fields.

Where to get help with the software itself

DL1YCF's repository: issues and discussions at the URL above, and the manual (a PDF of about 300 pages) attached to its releases. The Hermes Lite 2 community's mailing list and wiki cover piHPSDR with that radio. Licence: GPL-3.0-or-later.

Source: catalog/packages/pihpsdr.yaml