pyrtlsdr is a simple Python interface to devices supported by the RTL-SDR project, which turns certain USB DVB-T dongles employing the Realtek RTL2832U chipset into low-cost, general purpose software-defined radio receivers. It wraps all the functions in the librtlsdr library (including asynchronous read support), and also provides a more Pythonic API.

• Windows/Linux/OSX
• Python 2.7.x
• distribute (a fork of the Setuptools project)
• librtlsdr (builds dated after 5/5/12)
• Optional: NumPy (wraps samples in a more convenient form)

matplotlib is also useful for plotting data. The librtlsdr binaries (rtlsdr.dll in Windows and librtlsdr.so in Linux) should be in the pyrtlsdr directory, or a system path.

All functions in librtlsdr are accessible via librtlsdr.py and a Pythonic interface is available in rtlsdr.py (recommended). Some documentation can be found in docstrings in the latter file.

Simple way to read and print some samples:

from rtlsdr import RtlSdr

sdr = RtlSdr()

# configure device
sdr.sample_rate = 2e6
sdr.center_freq = 70e6
sdr.gain = 'auto'

print sdr.read_samples(32)

Plotting the PSD with matplotlib:

from pylab import *
from rtlsdr import *

sdr = RtlSdr()

# configure device
sdr.sample_rate = 3.2e6
sdr.center_freq = 95e6
sdr.gain = 4

samples = sdr.read_samples(500e3)

# use matplotlib to estimate and plot the PSD
psd(samples, NFFT=1024, Fs=sdr.sample_rate/1e6, Fc=sdr.center_freq/1e6)
xlabel('Frequency (MHz)')
ylabel('Relative power (dB)')

show()

Resulting plot here.

See the file 'test.py' for more examples.

Credit to dbasden for his earlier wrapper python-librtlsdr.

-- Roger