After installing GNUradio, there are some other tools to properly start experimenting on RF. One of the more versatiles ones is: fldigi!

I installed it with homebrew and it’s pretty straightforward: brew install fldigi

We also need a hardware to connect a standard transceiver to the computer. Usually an USB sound card+USB-to-serial is enough but we have better options like digirig!

I did try to attach a baofeng uv5r to fldigi using digirig. The configuration is pretty simple: Select digirig usb sound card for rx and tx and, on Rig Control/Hardware PTT, set “use a separated serial”, select the device and use RTS as the trigger.

uv5r+fldigi+digirig

It works like magic!

Next step is to talk to radio via python