Hardware requirements

Running the GUI

SDRangel is a near real time application that is demanding on CPU power and clock speeds for low latency. Recent (2015 or later) Core i7 class CPU is recommended preferably with 4 HT CPU cores (8 logical CPUs or more) with nominal clock over 2 GHz and at least 8 GB RAM. Modern Intel processors will include a GPU suitable for proper OpenGL support. On the other hand SDRangel is not as demanding as recent computer games for graphics and CPU integrated graphics are perfectly fine. USB-3 ports are also preferable for high speed, low latency USB communication. It may run on beefy SBCs and was tested successfully on a Udoo Ultra however the Raspberry Pi even version 4 is not powerful enough.

The GUI variant has also been reported to run successfully on an Open Power machine more specifically on a Talos II from Raptor Computing Systems

Binary distributions in the releases section are provided for x86_64 CPU architectures with at least extensions SSE 4.2 (Nehalem architecture).

Running the Server

The server variant does not need a graphical display and therefore OpenGL support. It can run on lighter hardware and armv8 variants of the Raspberry Pi (3B and 4) may fit this purpose. You will have to install an armv8 (arm64) O/S like Arch or Ubuntu for the 3B and Ubuntu for the 4. Running SDRangel in a Docker container is the best option. Docker images for arm64 are provided on Docker hub.