SDRdaemon plugin updates

In order to support the release under Windows I had to make SDRdaemon plugin more resilient to all sorts of troubles due to Windows being incapable of scheduling tasks properly and accurately. Thus we have now the following enhancements:

• Main buffer length display in seconds. A lag of half of this amount vs real time is expected.
• Read/Write pointers position in main buffer auto-correction (this is the B button in the GUI). You normally will want this one active
• Button to reset the Read/Write pointers to their initial position
• Button to control auto skew rate compensation activation (normally off)
• Gauges and display value to monitor the Read vs Write pointers drift
• Auto adapt to actual read polling throttle. In Windows this is way off the 50ms tick. Linux version also benefits from it since tick it is not always strictly every 50ms.
• Use a main buffer length of at least 8s and up to 50 times the frame size so that auto R/W pointer distance locking algorithm can be efficient statistically.

The remote control from the plugin is not implemented. This may become available in the near future. For now you have to control it directly via ZMQ messages. You can use the Python utility found in the SDRdaemon sources.

BFM demod plugin update

Fixed intermittent segmentation fault due to missing initializations.

HackRF plugin updates

File source input plugin updates

Rewrite of OpenGL calls

This is a major update for the OpenGL components (the spectrum and scope views). Initially this was in a move towards porting SDRangel to Android for which old fixed pipeline calls (OpenGL 1.1) are removed. The port to Android is still unsuccessful however it turned out that it facilitated the port to Windows and it makes the code ready for a possible future complete drop of fixed pipeline interfaces.

Porting to Windows

There is no change in functionality other that indirect changes to SDRdaemon plugin but this is a major step towards opening SDRangel to new platforms and thus possibilities. One may think of the Pipo series for example that run exclusively on Windows or Android. This can turn it into a nice portable SDR and signal analyzer. It was tested successfully on my Pipo-X8 under Windows8 with a RTL-SDR dongle.

However this comes with some limitations:

• BladeRF is not supported
• SDRdaemon plugin for working with a remote receiver does not work in all conditions or even does not work at all. This is a limitation of the OS. SDRdaemon works beautifully under Linux.

The code has been partially re-organized to facilitate integration with QtCreator:

• All files pertaining to sdrbase library are now located in the sdrbase folder. The include folder has been removed
• Some channel demod pliugins were renamed (xxx to demodxxx like am to demodam)

You can build it yourself or just unpack the .7z archive in this release to anywhere on your disk (ex: D:\Programs) and click on sdrangel.exe

You will need to install Zadig to get USB support for hardware devices. Please refer to Zadig website for details. Basically if you get things working for SDR# or HDSDR then it will work with SDRangel.