WaveShark for Linux

Linux is where WaveShark is developed, and it is the platform with the fewest surprises. The RTL-SDR and the Airspy are driven by the receiver’s own USB driver, so no librtlsdr, libairspy or libairspyhf is installed or loaded, and LimeSuite is opened only when a LimeSDR is looked for, whatever version the distribution carries.

The udev rules are the part people miss. Without them a dongle can only be opened as root, which is a permission error rather than a radio fault. The distribution’s rtl-sdr, airspy and airspyhf packages put them in place.

The arm64 packages run on a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 under a 64-bit system from bookworm onwards, which is what a machine at the antenna usually is. The speech models use an NVIDIA card on x86_64 when the CUDA 12 runtime is present and the CPU when it is not.

First run

1. Install the udev rules

   The package for your radio brings them. Nothing from it is loaded; WaveShark only needs the permission.

   $ sudo apt install rtl-sdr

2. Install WaveShark

   Either the package for your distribution and architecture, or the bare binary anywhere on your path.

   $ sudo apt install ./waveshark-*-linux-x86_64.deb

3. Plug in a radio and press play

   It opens on the dashboard and the dial starts at 433.92 MHz. Click the spectrum to place a channel and listen.

   $ waveshark --tune 433.92

4. Check the path if nothing arrives

   --probe tests the signal path with no display, which is what to run over ssh on a headless machine.

   $ waveshark --probe 433.92