Troubleshooting#
Frequent problems occurred during the course and their solutions.
PlutoSDR behaves strange#
Try to turn it off and on again.
Sometimes the GNU Radio flow graph shows utterly distorted constellations with PlutoSDR. Before trying some tweaks in your flow graph, restarting the hardware. This helped me.
Cannot tune to any FM radio station#
Symptom: You can select and use your hardware, however you only hear noise if you tune to a radio station, e.g., at 100 MHz.
Installing PlutoSDR m2k USB drivers fails Windows#
You may have an ARM-based laptop. Currently I don’t have a solution.
Gqrx: unknown escape sequence#
Did you use \ instead of /? Refer to Testing Gqrx with a recorded signal.
Gqrx does not show PlutoSDR in the device list MacOS#
Symptoms:
You followed the guide and installed GNU Radio companion using the .pkg file,
PlutoSDRdoes not show up in the list.You see a
PlutoSDRdevice in the devices, but no spectrum can be seen if you press on the ▶️ button.
First make sure that you use the Gqrx inside the Radioconda distribution. Installing Gqrx standalone does not work, because it uses another library called soapy to communicate with PlutoSDR, which is not installed along with Gqrx.
Secondly, you may have to change the USB Ethernet compatibility mode.
If the previous advices did not help, then you probably need to install libiio and soapy. A working solution is to install GNU Radio using conda. After the installation, pay attention that you have installed Soapy package for PlutoSDR, by issuing the following command after activating the GNU Radio Conda environment:
conda install soapysdr-module-plutosdr
If Conda does not work, you may try the instructions here.
As a workaround, use a self-build spectrum analyzer on GNU Radio to test your Pluto: Solution to. However, this should not work either, if you use the soapy interface to the ADALM-PLUTO.
Radioconda installation fails in the last moments & Radioconda cannot be found in Apps MacOS#
Radioconda installs itself under your home folder as default, i.e., /Users/your-user-name/radioconda. The installed programs will reside under .../radioconda/bin. If you cannot find this folder, then install Radioconda inside your apps folder, then you should see radioconda as a directory under apps.
ADALM-PLUTO does not work — LED1 does not blink#
Probably there was an error during firmware update. Do a manual update using DFU.
GNU Radio The blocks in the flow graph are nested inside each other#
Symptom: You open the flow graph, but it looks different than in the screenshot.