u/mustang6139

Hi r/cli 👋🏽

sdrtop is a terminal-based application designed for low-cost SDRs. It features a spectrum and measurement display and warns the user when the radio is being clipped or when samples are being dropped rather than providing false readings.

It can also detect Bluetooth and FM/RDS signals (without audio) from the air, such as clock drift, packet quality, and more, on HackRF, RTL-SDR, tinySA.

Repo: https://github.com/musithang/sdrtop

Honestly, every time I pull this out in public, I feel like a low budget 90s action movie hacker. 🤣

Upgrading from a heavy laptop, 3 tangled USB cables, and a powerbank into the middle of a field to just holding this little guy is the ultimate quality of life fix.

I just park the car, throw up an antenna, dump raw I/Q samples straight to the SD card, and process the messy math later at home over hot coffee.

What's your go-to "lazy" setup for capturing signals in the wild?

Hey everyone!

I wanted to share sdrtop, an open-source terminal SDR monitor I've been working on for the HackRF One and RTL-SDR. It's built entirely in Rust using ratatui and tokio to be a lightweight, keyboard-driven alternative to heavy GUI apps.

Note: You'll need an RTL-SDR or HackRF to actually use it, so unfortunately it's pretty niche!

Rather than wrapping existing DSP frameworks or GNU Radio blocks, I decided to write the demodulation and analysis pipeline natively in Rust to actually understand the math behind it.

Currently, the native DSP chain handles:

• AM: Demodulation with separate positive and negative peak depth measurements.
• FM / NFM: Frequency deviation tracking and CTCSS tone detection.
• MPX & RDS: 19 kHz stereo pilot detection and full 57 kHz RDS subcarrier decoding.
• Analysis: Live IQ constellation, signal characterization, and bandwidth measurements.

The FM/RDS path in particular became quite the rabbit hole 😅. Crunching raw high-throughput IQ streams from the USB bus and doing phase discrimination without blocking the ratatui render loop was a great concurrency exercise.

The TUI itself is fully modular and driven by TOML configuration files. You can preset and bind any analysis panel component to any position, and color themes are completely customizable via TOML as well.

It's still in active development, but if you're into Rust, TUI architecture, or SDRs, I'd love any code reviews, PRs, or feedback!

I used AI tools to assist during development.

👉 Repo: https://github.com/mustang6139/sdrtop

Hey guys,

Just wanted to show off the current state of SDRtop, a terminal monitor I'm building for Software Defined Radio hardware. It now supports both the HackRF One and RTL-SDR platforms!
It's still in very early development

I’m a huge fan of thetop ecosystem (htop, btop, etc.), and since I couldn't find a dedicated terminal dashboard for radio hardware, I decided to build one from scratch using Rust and Ratatui.

The goal was to create a clean, non-bloated interface that gives you an immediate glance at what your SDR hardware is doing (frequencies, sample rates, gain stages, and internal states) without leaving the shell.

A few details:

• Written entirely in Rust.
• Supports both HackRF One and RTL-SDR.
• Fully responsive layout (as much as the widgets allow).
• Focuses on low resource overhead.

The project is currently at v0.3.5 and as I mentioned, it's in a highly experimental, early stage. If you have an SDR device or just love terminal dashboards, check it out! Feedback on the UI/UX or code structure is highly appreciated.

Repo: mustang6139/sdrtop: Terminal monitor for SDR hardware - written in Rust. Early development.

Hey guys,

Just wanted to share a project I've been working on. sdrtop is a terminal-based live diagnostics monitor for SDR hardware, written in Rust.

It gives you a real-time view of your spectrum, waterfall, RF chain, and hardware health (like USB jitter and drops) without leaving your terminal. Fits perfectly into an SSH session, a tmux pane, or Linux-based cyberdecks.

It’s in early development, so right now it only works with the HackRF One, and some parts are still a bit laggy/experimental. I am continuously developing this in my free time.

Even if it still has some rough edges, at least it looks incredibly cool running on a cyberdeck or in a dark terminal window 😃

Feedback and feature suggestions are highly appreciated! Let me know what you think!

(Link to the GitHub repo is in the comments below!)