Skip to content

sdrpp

SDR++ — cross-platform SDR receiver with a modular DSP chain

What it does

A general-purpose SDR receiver: waterfall and spectrum display, a modular DSP chain, and demodulators for the usual analogue modes, driving RTL-SDR, Airspy, HackRF, SDRplay, PlutoSDR, LimeSDR and anything reachable through SoapySDR.

Why you would want it

It is fast, it is comfortable on modest hardware, and its module system means a new radio or a new decoder is a plugin rather than a fork. For many operators it is the day-to-day receiver that GQRX used to be.

Before it will work

A supported receiver and its driver library. On Debian 13 there is no apt package, so it needs the source build — and therefore the source-from-git backend this project has not written yet.

How it installs

  • apt: sdrpp — on kali, parrot
  • Measured 2026-08-26. Kali: 0.0~git20260520.36ea9a1+dfsg-2. Parrot: the same snapshot backported, +dfsg-2~bpo13+1. Absent from Debian 13.
  • git (cmake) — https://github.com/AlexandreRouma/SDRPlusPlus at 36ea9a143422f5b374371461667ff53fb9387300
  • build dependencies: build-essential, cmake, pkg-config, libfftw3-dev, libglfw3-dev, libvolk-dev, libsoapysdr-dev, librtlsdr-dev, libairspy-dev, libairspyhf-dev, libhackrf-dev, librtaudio-dev, libad9361-dev, libiio-dev, libzstd-dev
  • Needs the source-from-git backend, which is NOT WRITTEN. The manifest is data and is correct today; nothing can act on it yet. Note libvolk-dev, not libvolk2-dev — the SONAME changed and upstream's bookworm .deb still wants the old name, which is why that artifact fails on Debian 13.

Known problems

Upstream has not tagged a release since 2021 and publishes binaries only under a rolling nightly tag with no version and no checksum, so there is nothing stable to point a download at. This manifest builds from the commit Kali and Parrot package rather than from that artifact. Upstream's debian_bookworm .deb additionally fails on Debian 13 because it depends on libvolk2-dev, a package name that no longer exists.

Keeping it current

  • probe: apt policy
  • strategy: rebuild

Source: catalog/packages/sdrpp.yaml