Bald Yak 16: How do you decode FM?

About this episode

The episode explores various methods to decode FM signals using software implementations.

Foundations of Amateur Radio How do you make a hole? That's a pretty straightforward kind of question, and by the time this sentence is finished, there's going to be at least as many answers as people who considered it. I didn't supply any parameters to this hole, so answers could include shovels, collapsing space, fire, a drill, or any number of other interesting approaches. If I narrowed it down to, say, a hole in wood, there'd still be plenty of options. Specifying the type of wood, the diameter and other parameters would further narrow down the selection of methods. What if I asked you: "How do you decode FM?" You might wonder if there's more than one way and I can assure you, just like with making a hole, there's plenty of ways to go about achieving this, even if I limit this to software implementations only. I must confess, when I recently set out to test my Soapy SDR library notions using a GNU Radio flowgraph to listen to FM radio, I searched the documentation, found a beginners tutorial and used the information there to make my first proof of concept FM receiver. I put it on GitHub and went about my business. After finally managing to hear the decode effort and being…

Topics covered

• FM decoding
• GNU Radio
• Soapy SDR
• software implementations

Keywords

• amateur radio
• tutorial
• flowgraph
• stereo FM

Mentioned in this episode

Products: Soapy SDR library, GNU Radio, GNU Radio Companion, Soapy SDR

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