I used this guide – but I had to change quite a lot when it came to configuring it as they set up a satellite TV receiver and I am just using Freeview. Here’s roughly what I did…įirst I installed tvheadend on a RaspberryPi 3. It involved a lot of fiddling in a studio-managerly fashion. I finished at about 1am and I didn’t take notes. How did I get this working? Glad you asked me that. ts (transmission stream) file on the Pi – this is the format used by PVRs and can be played in VLC (and converted to a more compact, portable format using other apps too.) I even managed to schedule a recording on my MacBook which was recorded as a. I can now watch live TV & radio off air on my Pi (admittedly not full screen) – and possibly even more usefully, the Pi will stream TV to other devices on my home network, so I can watch live TV in a browser or using VLC on my laptop anywhere in the house. What I did get working was a Freeview TV tuner and server on the Raspberry Pi.

The ‘waterfall’ is useful for spotting sporadic transmissions on adjacent frequencies. Nonetheless on the left here you can see me listening to planes on the Heathrow approach frequency. Gqrx is available in an experimental version for the Raspberry Pi but I haven’t got it working very well yet – it seems much noisier than it did on the Mac (possibly because I’m in a different room), I had to run it using a -r command line switch to get round a bug where the waveform didn’t show and RDS doesn’t seem to work. VERY annoyingly I can’t find any Mac software for decoding DAB radio, though you can do this on Windows and Linux machines.

You can do all sorts of other clever stuff with SDRs like receiving weather maps and plotting aeroplane and boats on maps. The USB stick uses a common chipset and works as a normal FM radio tuner with RDS, but pretty soon I had stumbled upon Heathrow Approach and could listen to radio chat from the cabins of planes flying over my house and later I found some OB frequencies used by ITN (nicely idented) and I assume the BBC (at least I think that’s why I was hearing Radio 2 on some VERY strange frequencies!). Having grown up in a ham radio-filled household, this was quite nostalgic tuning different bands looking for stuff.

As soon as I got my chunky blue stick – a NooElec R820T2 – I plugged in its little antenna and installed the gqrx radio receiving software on my MacBook. What is an SDR? It’s a Software Defined Radio – a radio tuner that allows you to listen to analogue broadcasts over a wide range of frequencies and – with the right software – watch and record digital TV. I’ve had a cheap USB SDR stick sitting in my Amazon basket for… about 2 years.

Usb tv stick on raspberry pi