CubicSDR

Cross-Platform Software-Defined Radio Application

• The latest downloads are available on the CubicSDR Releases page.
• Build instructions can be found at the CubicSDR Wiki page.
• Manual is available at cubicsdr.readthedocs.io.
• Manual contributions can be submitted to the CubicSDR-Manual repository.

What's new in this fork

This fork is based on cjcliffe/CubicSDR. Native macOS Apple Silicon (ARM64) DMGs are built by GitHub Actions and published on the fork's Releases page.

Changes are grouped by area. Type marks whether a change is a new feature (green), an optimization (blue) or a fix (yellow).

Area	Type	Change	Details
RDS		RDS decoding	PI, PS, PTY, TP, TA on the FMS demod
		RadioText	2A/2B text shown above the demod label
		Mono-station RDS	Decodes stations without a 19 kHz pilot
		Error correction	5-bit burst fix, no garbage on weak signals
Squelch		NBFM "Q" squelch	Noise-based, stays open in speech pauses
		Click-free gating	Pre-roll, fades, ~120 ms tail
Audio		RNNoise	Off / Mid / Strong noise reduction
		De-emphasis	Configurable for FM and NBFM
		Playout diagnostics	Logs latency, dropouts, overflows
		Latency control	Bounded delay despite clock drift and stalls
		Lock-free ring buffers	No mutexes in the audio callback
DSP & modems		Symbol sync	Timing recovery for digital modes
		Fewer copies	IQ swapped, circular FFT buffer
		Stream gaps	Tuning survives resets and packet edges
Spectrum & graphics		3D spectrum history	Audio history view and FFT overlay
		VBO rendering	3 draw calls per frame, compact waterfall
		FFT power	Hann window, normalized dB, no NaN
SDR & threads		macOS QoS	All DSP threads at user-interactive priority
		Runtime stability	SoapyRemote, timeouts, reconnect, shutdown
Build & tests		macOS app bundle	Native ARM64, LTO, LZMA DMG (~19% smaller)
		./build.sh	One-command build (see Building)
		Unit tests	Hardware-free: RDS, squelch, audio, modems

Building

macOS (Apple Silicon)

1. Install the Xcode Command Line Tools and the Homebrew dependencies:

   xcode-select --install
   brew install cmake wxwidgets@3.2 liquid-dsp soapysdr hamlib librtlsdr soapyrtlsdr
   

   soapyrtlsdr gives you RTL-SDR support. build.sh needs at least one SoapySDR device module installed. To use other hardware, install its module too, for example from the pothosware/pothos tap (brew tap pothosware/pothos && brew install soapyhackrf soapyairspy) or built from the pothosware sources. Every installed module is bundled into the app.

2. Build a self-contained, ad-hoc signed app bundle:

   ./build.sh
   

   The app is written to build-clean/dist/CubicSDR.app.

Useful options:

Command	Effect
./build.sh --clean	Delete the build directory and rebuild from scratch
./build.sh --run	Build, then launch the app
./build.sh -- -DUSE_RNNOISE=OFF	Pass extra CMake options after --
BUILD_TYPE=Debug ./build.sh	Debug build (default is Release)
BUILD_DIR=build-dev ./build.sh	Use another build directory (default is build-clean)
JOBS=4 ./build.sh	Limit parallel build jobs (default is the logical CPU count)
WX_CONFIG=/path/to/wx-config ./build.sh	Use a different wxWidgets 3.2 wx-config

Release DMGs are built by the macOS ARM64 DMG workflow. It adds -mcpu=apple-m1 tuning and LTO, builds pinned SoapySDR device modules, and packages an LZMA-compressed DMG.

Linux and Windows

build.sh supports macOS only. On other platforms, configure and build with CMake directly, following the upstream CubicSDR Wiki build instructions:

cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build --parallel

Unit tests

Tests are built by default through CMake's BUILD_TESTING option and do not require SDR hardware or a graphical session. After configuring and building, run:

ctest --test-dir build-clean --output-on-failure

To build only the test executable:

cmake --build build-clean --target CubicSDRTests

Clang builds can also generate a terminal summary and browsable HTML coverage report:

cmake -S . -B build-coverage -DCUBICSDR_TEST_COVERAGE=ON
cmake --build build-coverage --target CubicSDRCoverage

The HTML report is written to build-coverage/tests/coverage/index.html. The coverage target requires at least 80% region, function, line, and branch coverage. It measures code linked into CubicSDRTests, excluding test sources and vendored code; it does not represent coverage of the entire GUI app or live audio/SDR hardware paths. Device capability tests use an in-process fake SoapySDR driver and do not connect to a receiver.

Utilizes:

• liquid-dsp (http://liquidsdr.org/ -- https://github.com/jgaeddert/liquid-dsp)
• SoapySDR (http://www.pothosware.com/ -- https://github.com/pothosware/SoapySDR)
• RtAudio (http://www.music.mcgill.ca/~gary/rtaudio/ -- http://github.com/thestk/rtaudio/)
• LodePNG (http://lodev.org/lodepng/)
• BMFont (http://www.angelcode.com/ -- http://www.angelcode.com/products/bmfont/)
• Bitstream Vera font (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitstream_Vera)
• OpenGL (https://www.opengl.org/)
• wxWidgets (https://www.wxwidgets.org/)
• CMake (http://www.cmake.org/)

Optional Libs:

• FFTW3 (can be compiled into liquid-dsp if desired) (http://www.fftw.org/ -- https://github.com/FFTW/fftw3)
• hamlib (https://github.com/Hamlib/Hamlib)

Recommended minimum requirements:

• Multi-core processor system with at least 1GB RAM.
• Graphics card with at least 128MB video memory and OpenGL 3.x or ES 2.0 support.
• OSX 10.9+ for Mac binary releases.
• Windows 7+ for 64 or 32-bit Windows binary releases.
• Linux and other embedded distribution support yet to be indexed, known to at least work on Debian 8+ and Ubuntu 14+.

Target Platforms:

• OSX
• Windows
• Linux

License:

• GPL-2.0+