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DAB with a Quirk: Getting to know QIRX
Get the Most out of DAB
A Host of Analytical Tools for DAB - and ADS-B Decoding
Our friend and contributor Nils Schiffhauer reports on the new QIRX software suite for DAB (Digital Audio Broadcast) listening with Software-Defined Receivers.
The program was created by Clem Schmidt, DF9GI, from Frankfurt. It works with RTL-SDR, Airspy and RSP2 SDRs.
QIRX excels in a number of analytical tools and an OSM-based map showing your location, as well as the locations of transmitters, all metadata transmitted, plus other features like connection to GPS receiver’s NMEA output for mobile use. It can be also used just to listen, of course.
QIRX offers a scanner, catching all DAB muxes from all the transmitters within the reach of your antenna. Scanning is done in the background, and it may loop through (click: “Scan forever”) for hours or even days.
It continually writes the results in the TII Logfile for future inspection – a great tool which will reveal even short openings over a specific time – scatter by tropo, aircraft or meteors among these.
As an SDR aficionado, you will be pleased to see the spectrum and the spectrogram (waterfall) of the signal, the receiver is tuned to. One of the most exciting features of QIRX are its analytic tools, to measure, for example, channel impulse response, time sequence of IQ data, and much more.
You can also use QIRX to decode ADS-B data from aircraft.
We will cover QIRK in one of our forthcoming issues.
Images are by kind permission of Nils Schiffhauer.
In the meantime, you can read more on Nils’s blog here: