SDRCrew 2.9: the Perseus over USB, GPS and a website of our own

SDRCrew 2.9 is out. There are few news but they are the ones many people asked for: the Perseus working without strange detours, the real GPS position for radiosondes, the Morse of satellites. And SDRCrew finally has a website: sdrcrew.com.

PERSEUS STRAIGHT OVER USB

Plug it in and it shows up by itself as "Perseus (USB)" in the Dongle list of every receiving tab. No ExtIO plug-in, no old driver, no V5 licence: the WinUSB driver that Microtelecom's V5 software installs is enough. Firmware and FPGA are inside the program, thanks to the open library libperseus-sdr. It covers up to 40 MHz. The old ExtIO plug-in stays as a fallback in the Sources tab, which now has a "Look for the Perseus on USB" button.

GPS IN THE RADIOSONDES

You can plug in a USB GPS (serial port) or have your phone send the position (NMEA over UDP). Distance and bearing to the sonde follow you as you move and, above 5 km/h, the arrow turns relative to your direction of travel: "12 degrees to your right". Handy when you go looking for the landing spot.

CW OF SATELLITE BEACONS

In the satellites' HAM tab there is a "Decode CW" box: it reads the audio you are listening to as Morse. The tone locks by itself and the speed adapts, because many cubesats send their telemetry in CW.

OTHER THINGS

• The SDRplay now works through the official API 3.15, called directly (the old module could not read the current API).
• The receiver check in the Info tab is more precise: no more "needs Zadig" for an Airspy that is already fine, a note for the HackRF Pro and, for the Perseus, a check of driver and files.
• If the Perseus driver is missing the program says so at once, instead of hanging with an invisible window.

THE WEBSITE

There is now https://sdrcrew.com, in Italian and English, with screenshots of the program and the link to download it.

TELL ME HOW IT GOES

Perseus, GPS and CW are brand new: if you try them in the field, with a real receiver, a real GPS or a real beacon, please tell me how it went. The Perseus reaches the tabs with 8-bit samples, like a dongle.

Updates reach everyone who already has SDRCrew automatically. Everyone else: https://codeberg.org/IU2PYG/sdrcrew-releases

73 de IU2PYG