Tools

Official command-line driver/utilities (airspy_rx and friends) for Airspy-brand SDR receivers, used for raw IQ capture independent of a GUI front end.

airspy_rx -f 100.0 -a 10000000 -r output.raw

Cross-platform general-purpose SDR receiver GUI aimed at being simpler to get running than SDR#/GQRX on any given OS, with a spectrum/waterfall view and basic demodulation.

Decodes common digital voice radio protocols (P25, DMR, D-STAR, NXDN and more) from a demodulated audio stream, typically fed by rtl_fm.

rtl_fm -f 154.6M -s 48000 | dsd -i - -o /dev/null

A free software-defined-radio development toolkit — a flow-graph-based signal-processing framework that HackRF, RTL-SDR, BladeRF and USRP tooling is commonly built on top of.

GNU Radio-based SDR receiver GUI for Linux/macOS with a waterfall display and the standard analog demodulators — a common first stop for exploring what a new SDR dongle can hear.

GNU Radio out-of-tree module for receiving and decoding GSM traffic with an SDR — the standard building block behind most "GSM sniffing with a $20 dongle" demos.

grgsm_livemon_headless -f 935.2M

Offline viewer for analysing recorded IQ capture files by eye — zoom, measure and manually mark out symbols in a signal before writing a decoder for it.

inspectrum capture.cfile

A wireless network and device detector, sniffer and WIDS framework — covers WiFi, Bluetooth, and SDR-fed protocols well beyond what aircrack-ng alone monitors.

kismet -c wlan0

Decodes classic digital paging/data-over-radio protocols (POCSAG, FLEX, AFSK, DTMF and more) from an audio stream, usually piped straight from rtl_fm.

rtl_fm -f 152.0M | multimon-ng -a POCSAG512 -t raw -

Web-based SDR receiver server — points a browser at a shared radio front end so a receiver can be listened to and demodulated remotely without installing client software.

Open-source GSM baseband firmware and host tools for a handful of old Motorola phones, letting researchers run and inspect the actual GSM protocol stack instead of only sniffing the air interface.

Community-maintained firmware for the PortaPack add-on that turns a HackRF into a standalone, battery-powered handheld SDR — transmit/receive/replay without a laptop attached.

Decodes and prints the traffic of hundreds of ISM-band devices (weather stations, tyre-pressure sensors, wireless doorbells, key fobs) from an RTL-SDR-class dongle.

rtl_433 -f 433.92M

The driver and command-line utilities (rtl_sdr, rtl_fm, rtl_tcp) that turned cheap DVB-T USB dongles into general-purpose SDR receivers — the hardware most of this category is built on.

rtl_sdr -f 433920000 -s 250000 capture.bin

One of the original general-purpose SDR receiver front ends — waterfall, demodulators and a plugin ecosystem, still widely used with RTL-SDR/Airspy/HackRF hardware.

Full-featured SDR receiver and transmitter application with dozens of built-in demodulators (including digital voice), a REST API, and multi-device/multi-channel support.

GUI workbench for reverse-engineering unknown radio protocols — demodulate, decode and re-encode signals, then fuzz them, without writing GNU Radio flowgraphs by hand.