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sdrangel

SDR transceiver and analyser that does several things at once

What it does

A full SDR application built around independent channel plugins: one device's captured bandwidth can feed several demodulators and analysers simultaneously -- AM, FM, SSB, DSD-based digital voice, APT and satellite decoders, ADS-B, packet, a spectrum analyser and a scope -- each in its own panel. It transmits as well as receives on hardware that can, and it drives almost every SDR in common use.

Why you would want it

It is the most feature-dense SDR application in open source, and the reason to reach for it over gqrx or SDR++ is when you want to do several things to one capture at the same time. Watching a band while decoding two signals in it, or running an analyser alongside a demodulator, is a single window here and three programs fighting over a dongle anywhere else.

Before it will work

An SDR and its driver library. A capable machine: SDRangel is computationally heavy and benefits from a GPU for its display. On Debian 13, Parrot, Ubuntu 24.04 and Linux Mint, nothing here installs -- see the install notes for what was measured.

How it installs

  • prebuilt deb from https://github.com/f4exb/sdrangel/releases/download/v7.27.2/sdrangel_7.27.2_ubuntu-26.04_amd64.deb — on ubuntu; version 26.04; arch x86_64
  • Upstream's own .deb, built for this release. Ubuntu 26.04 has no archive candidate (measured on the VM, 2026-09-01) and this artefact resolves against stock 26.04 (apt-get install -s: Inst sdrangel 7.27.2-1).
  • apt: sdrangel
  • Only Kali carries this in an archive. Measured across all six targets on 2026-08-28: Kali 7.27.1+dfsg-2, and no candidate on Debian 13, Ubuntu 26.04, Parrot or Linux Mint 22.3. docs/reference/install-verification.md recorded the same absence from Debian 13 in its Tier 1 probe. Upstream publishes three Ubuntu .debs per release, and on 2026-09-01 each was measured against apt's resolver: the 26.04 build resolves on 26.04 (carried above); the 24.04 build depends on libuhd4.10.0, which noble does not ship -- upstream builds against Ettus's PPA, a third-party repository -- so it does not install on a stock 24.04 or on Linux Mint 22.3; the 22.04 build has the same UHD dependency; and no build fits Debian 13 or Parrot, whose ffmpeg, OpenCV, UHD and Qt sit between the 24.04 and 26.04 generations (24.04 wants libavcodec60, qtbase-abi-5-15-13; 26.04 wants libavcodec62, libqt6core6t64 >= 6.10.2; trixie has neither). On those targets this manifest reports an apt gap rather than install, which is the honest answer. The remaining upstream artefacts are a flatpak and a snap: flatpak is a measured zero as a backend and snap is an anti-dependency (D-014).

Known problems

The interface is dense enough to be genuinely hard to start with; the plugin model means almost nothing is where a gqrx user expects it. Its transmit capability is real RF on hardware that can radiate, which is why this entry is categorised rf-security as well as sdr and reaches an operator through a profile requiring explicit opt-in. Debian's build is +dfsg, so components that could not be distributed have been removed and a feature present upstream may be absent here.

Keeping it current

  • probe: apt policy
  • strategy: apt_upgrade

Where to get help with the software itself

Edouard Griffiths, F4EXB -- also the author of the dsdcc decoder this catalog carries. GitHub issues and a wiki linked from the site.

Source: catalog/packages/sdrangel.yaml