Updated Wiki: Home

Project Description

Mnm4Sdr moves to Bitbucket

GUI for remote Raspberry-Pi (Raspbian with rtl-sdr installed) and DVB-T dongle over SSH connection with Low bandwidth and Stability as goals.

• Two formats for download available: Windows Installer (msi) and Portable (zip). If you have previous version and want to retain the Database, please backup MNCdata.mdf and MNCdata_log.ldf. After finished installation you can replace these two files by previous backup.

• Tutorial MNM4SDR and decoding RDS (At Btbucket Wiki)

Short but excellent review of the Project could be find at RTL-SDR blog http://www.rtl-sdr.com/new-raspberry-pi-remote-rtl-sdr-gui-software-mnm4sdr/.

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Figure 1. Scanning GSM-900 European Downlink band.

You can build your own RF monitoring network based on Raspberry Pi or share your RPi monitoring stations with your friends or just use it as a feed for an internet audio stream.
FEATURES:

• Listen to audio from Remote RPi by streaming back from station to your desktop, FLAC and OGG (higher CPU usage) encoded.
• Stream rate could be set to 192000 bit/s and it makes possible RDS decoding with RDS Spy. (Because of FLAC encoder stream rate could be lower but 192000 is safe bet)
• Scanning RF bands (Spectrum and Waterfall diagrams)
• Save CSV file of scanned band for further analysis or as input to the heatmap.py or similar program.
• Save raw output of rtl_fm for further analysis.
• Controlling rtl_tcp in much convenient manner so You can connect third party software (SDR#, GQRX, ...) and switch between RPis as easy as a couple of clicks.
• Save raw IQ data at specified frequency and sample rate.
• There is not any limitation on the number of running MNM4SDR as long as any of running MNM4SDR session is connected to different RPi station. So you can work with many of RPi stations in parallel.
• For the people with Up/Down converters, The offset frequency can be set now.

The system consists of the Management station(s) and Monitoring station(s) communicating in real-time over the network. Low-cost (and simple) RF monitoring system based on Management software MNM4SDR and networked Raspberry-Pi (Raspbian, RTL-SDR, SSH) stations equiped with DVB-T dongles (List of supported dongles is here http://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr)

Architecture - Components of system

Management station
The name MNM4SDR belongs to management program installed on the Management station (It is PC with Windows operating system on it) and used to scan RF bands or specific frequency, log results to file and execute remote commands in order to demodulated signal could be streamed back from Monitoring station.
MNM4SDR stands for Monitoring Network Managerfor RTL-SDR

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Monitoring station
System is developed and tested with Raspbian on the Raspberry-Pi B+, but You can use whatever flavor of linux you want. Here is the very simple script I've used to speed up installation of all necessary components on clean Raspbian. I've tested it (but not thoroughly) and it works on fresh new Raspbian 2015-05-05. The script must be run with root privileges but make it executable at first (chmod +x <file>)
http://download-codeplex.sec.s-msft.com/Download?ProjectName=mnm4sdr&DownloadId=1475465

#!/bin/bash
echo "UPDATING SYSTEM AND INSTALLING PACKAGES..."
apt-get update
apt-get install vlc
apt-get install git cmake libusb-1.0.dev build-essential
apt-get install libtool autoconf automake libfftw3-dev
echo "BUILDING RTL-SDR..."
git clone git://git.osmocom.org/rtl-sdr.git
cd rtl-sdr/
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ../ -DINSTALL_UDEV_RULES=ON
make
make install
ldconfig
printf '%s\n%s\n%s\n'  'blacklist dvb_usb_rtl28xxu' 'blacklist rtl2830' 'blacklist rtl2832' >> /etc/modprobe.d/rtl283x-blacklist.conf
depmod -a
echo "BUILDING KALIBRATE-RTL..."
git clone https://github.com/steve-m/kalibrate-rtl
cd kalibrate-rtl/
./bootstrap
./configure
make
make install
ldconfig
echo "FINISHED, REBOOT NOW!!!"

The simplest monitoring station is shown here.

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For deeper understanding please refer to:

1. http://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr
2. http://kmkeen.com/rtl-power/
3. http://kmkeen.com/rtl-demod-guide/
4. https://www.videolan.org/doc/videolan-howto/en/ch09.html