Bald Yak 19: SoapyAudio adventures

Bald Yak 19: SoapyAudio adventures

May 30, 2026 · 5 min

About this episode

This episode discusses the SoapyAudio software and its integration with Software Defined Radio tools.

Foundations of Amateur Radio Previously I've talked about a piece of software called SoapyAudio. It's part of the toolkit called SoapySDR which in turn is part of a whole ecosystem called the Pothos framework, coordinated by Pothosware, founded by Josh Blum. I'm mentioning this for two reasons, first to give credit to Josh and the many contributions he has made to the Software Defined Radio ecosystem and second, to indicate that there's several moving parts here. SoapyAudio is a module that connects an audio device, like a microphone or a speaker, more on that in a moment, to a tool called SoapySDR. This allows you to connect to that device, either directly, or over the network, from within any Soapy compatible SDR tool, like Cubic SDR, SDRangel, Quisk and SDR++ to name a few. Said differently, you can use the SoapyAudio module to pretend that your sound card is a Software Defined Radio, and use the associated SDR tools to use it. While interesting in and of itself, the idea comes into focus if you consider that you could connect your analogue radio to the sound card and now you have actual radio frequencies coming into your card, which you can use as an SDR. This works because…

People in this episode

Host: Onno (VK6FLAB)

Topics covered

Keywords

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Pothosware

Products: SoapyAudio, SoapySDR, Cubic SDR, SDRangel, Quisk, SDR++, Hamlib

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