🎉 Multi device support
This is the main point of this release and justifies the bump in major version. This is effectively an evolution of paradigm and involves a lot of internal changes although it may not catch the eye when looking at the interface.
Starting with this release multiple sampling devices (i.e. RTL-SDR dongles, Funcube dongles, HackRFs, File Source instances, SDRdaemon instances, etc..) are allowed to run concurrently. The audio of all channels producing audio from all devices is mixed in the final audio output. Each device resides in a device slot with corresponding device tabs in some critical windows of the main display. Thus the previous "X0" tab that was static is replaced with dynamically allocated tabs "R0, R1, R2, ..." corrsponding to the device slots 0, 1, 2, ... The "R' denotes a receiving device and is a provision for future (version 3) transmitting devices that will be tagged "T".
Device slots are added at the end of the device stack or removed from the top of device stack using the main window Acquisition menu "Add device" and "Remove device" options. The first device slot (R0) is added at startup and cannot be removed.
It may not seem obvious at first look but there are however important changes in the main interface. You can check here for the main interface documentation. The changes are:
- The "File" menu is left with only the Exit (Ctl-Q) option
- The "View" menu is left with only the Fullscreen (F11) option
- The "Acquisition" menu original options (Start/Stop device, Start/Stop recording) is replaced with the "Add device" and "Remove device" options. The original function key shortcuts (F5 to F8) are removed. These options are now handled at device level. Using these options you can add more sampling devices and remove them one by one (see main interface documnentation for details)
- The "Window" menu is unchanged but the original Source window has been replaced by two windows: Sampling Devices and Sampling Devices Control.
- The status bar has changed completely since device related displays have been moved to the Sampling Device window. It has been replaced with a general status and current date and time.
Functions related to device management (start/stop, start/stop recording) are reported to the Sampling Device window for each device.
Following the windows re-arrangement with presets filed from the previous SDRangel revisions the new windows may not display the way you like. It is usually convenient to have the Sampling Devices window sitting at the top of the left bar. You can just drag and drop the window there and save the preset the next time you load the preset it will appear in the desired place.
Other changes
Code cleanup
The following inactive plugins code has been removed:
- gnuradio
- osmosdr
- v4l-rtl
- v4l-msi
- tetra demodulator