Merge kalibrate-hackrf with kalibrate-rtl? (add RTL-SDR support) and-or kalibrate-bladerf? / or use SDR abstraction layer (SoapySDR?)

[rxseger]

Would it be possible to merge the two kalibrate's for hackrf and rtl into one project supporting both SDRs?

kalibrate-rtl: https://github.com/steve-m/kalibrate-rtl - last updated 2013, but includes several open pull requests: steve-m/kalibrate-rtl#5 steve-m/kalibrate-rtl#6 steve-m/kalibrate-rtl#9

kalibrate-rtl is also included in Kali Linux: http://tools.kali.org/wireless-attacks/kalibrate-rtl - but not http://tools.kali.org/wireless-attacks/kalibrate-hackrf

I was about to try to merge kalibrate-rtl and kalibrate-hackrf, but even though they both descended from kalibrate 0.4.1 (originally from http://thre.at/kalibrate/kal-v0.4.1.tar.bz2 but now thre.at is down), the code formatting style is different (whitespace) for some reason making this non-trivial (but did merge the -rtl PR's into: https://github.com/rxseger/kalibrate-hackrf). Which should be considered the "original" fork to merge the other one into?

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update: answering my own question, -hackrf is a direct ancestor of -rtl, no additional commits merged into -rtl after Dec 14th, 2013, which -hackrf (this repo) is based on. The main device-specific commits are:

• replace USRP with librtlsdr
• replace librtlsdr with libhackrf

would be cool to support all three (USRP, RTL-SDR, HackRF), but perhaps rebuilding Kalibrate on top of an abstracted SDR platform e.g. GNU Radio would be better?

[rxseger]

Adding RTL-SDR support may also help in investigating the cause of #6 Is it right (wildly inconsistent results on different channels, e.g. -33.570 ppm vs 38.369 ppm), for comparison.

to do: get a cheap rtl-sdr dongle to test with (first kalibrate-rtl, then work on merging into -hackrf)

[rxseger]

Instead of platform-specific SDR libraries, consider using a vendor-neutral library, e.g. SoapySDR (as used by CubicSDR, even has Homebrew recipes) or gr-osmosdr

[Romeo-Golf]

I agree it would be useful to have a version of calibrate which combines any/all receivers currently supported on separate forks... And hopefully this would allow any future development work to benefit users of all of these platforms :)