Changes

The following install guide details the steps from a fresh Ubuntu 20.04 install to a fully running GNU Radio + USRP B200 frequency hopping spread spectrum setup needed to capture smart meter data. The guide will be updated/broken out as additional SDR's like the HackRF and RTL-SDR are added.

There is nothing special about Ubuntu, it was chosen because it works well across different computers and has a familiar interface. Likely these instructions can be used as a rough guide for what is needed with other distro's.

</syntaxhighlight><code>sudo apt install liborc-0.4-dev vim</code>

This guide and the blocks used here are all dependent on GNU Radio 3.8. As 3.9 has been released for a while more blocks and packages are getting support so this guide may be updated in the future to support 3.9.<syntaxhighlight lang="bash">

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gnuradio/gnuradio-releases-3.8

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This is specific to the USRP B200 software defined radio, if you are using another SDR this will not be necessary.

<code>sudo apt-get install libuhd-dev libuhd3.15.0 uhd-host</code>

If this doesn't work your files may have been installed in /usr/local/lib instead of /usr/lib

<code>sudo /usr/lib/uhd/utils/uhd_images_downloader.py</code>

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cd /usr/lib/uhd/utils/

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<code>sudo apt-get install build-essential cmake libusb-1.0-0-dev pkg-config libfftw3-dev</code>

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git clone https://github.com/mossmann/hackrf.git

sudo ldconfig

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git clone git://git.osmocom.org/gr-osmosdr

sudo ldconfig

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If you already have GNU Radio and your SDR setup you should start here to install the Sandia Laboratories out of tree (OOT) modules. Four different OOT modules are needed.

#[https://github.com/sandialabs/gr-sandia_utils Sandia Utilities]

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cd

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git clone https://github.com/sandialabs/gr-pdu_utils.git

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git clone https://github.com/sandialabs/gr-fhss_utils.git

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git clone https://github.com/sandialabs/gr-timing_utils.git

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git clone https://github.com/sandialabs/gr-sandia_utils.git

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gnuradio-companion will give you errors if it can't find your python libraries that were just installed. Also highly suggest starting gnuradio-companion from a terminal as opposed to the icon in Ubuntu. It gives you a nice way to see console output and you have to configure path variables in other places to run gnuradio-companion with the icon.

#close all open terminals and re-open them

If your system is like mine they will be in:

You can easily confirm by using "ls" to show all the files there, if you see folder names corresponding to the packages installed above you have the correct folder. If not, try searching for other occurrences of "dist-packages" on your system where they may have been placed.

Add the following to the end of your .bashrc if there is no PYTHONPATH variable.