SDRCrew 1.0.1 — automatic DAB calibration

Version 1.0.1 of SDRCrew is out, with a feature I cared about a lot in the DAB tab.

📻 Automatic ppm calibration

Every RTL-SDR dongle has a small factory error on its crystal, different from dongle to dongle: without correcting it DAB simply does not lock. Until now you had to guess it by hand or go through a round of "typical" channels for your country.

Now you just press "Calibrate": the app scans all 38 Band III channels by itself, finds the strongest signal with a real decode (not just signal power, which can be misleading), and computes the dongle's real ppm on it. No country selection, no manual configuration - it works anywhere in the world there is a DAB+ transmitter within antenna range.

I tested it live on six different dongles, with very different crystal errors (from 17 to 77 ppm) - all calibrated correctly and automatically.

The DAB tab also has two more indicators: a VU meter for the audio volume and a signal quality bar based on correctly decoded data packets.

🎚️ More precise slider

A small refinement in the Spectrum tab: the bandwidth slider now always stops on clean multiples of 50 Hz instead of random numbers.

As always the app's automatic update will tell you by itself, or you can find it on Codeberg.