Problems with SparSDR are most likely to happen when the radio is not configured correctly. This document describes some debugging strategies that may be useful.
By receiving some compressed samples and looking at them, you can see if they look reasonable. There are two ways to write the samples to a file. They should both work the same and produce similar-looking files.
Run sparsdr_receive --antenna=RX2 --output-path=sample_capture.iqz --threshold=5000 --gain=30 --frequency=2450000000 --mask-bins 0..1024 (stop it after a few seconds).
Use the Python script, located at examples/uhd_rx_compressed_cfile/uhd_rx_compressed_cfile in this repository: uhd_compressed_rx_cfile -f 2.45e9 -g 30 --threshold 5000 -A RX2 -s Raw_SparSDR_capture
Use the Python script located at utilities/fpga_compress_with_avg_print.py to display samples in a human-readable format: fpga_compress_with_avg_print.py < SparSDR_capture > SparSDR_capture_readable
To get a sense of what the samples should look like, try running fpga_compress_with_avg_print.py on one of the example files in this repository: examples/sparsdr_receive/sample_capture.iqz or examples/uhd_rx_compressed_cfile/Raw_SparSDR_capture. A normal file contains groups of average samples and FFT (data) samples. The FFT samples within a group are sorted by the bit-reversal of the FFT index.
You can use sparsdr_reconstruct to read compressed samples from a file, reconstruct the signals, and write them to another file. Here is an example command: sparsdr_reconstruct --bins 63 --center-frequency=30e6 --source Raw_SparSDR_capture --destination reconstructed_capture. The command line documentation gives full details about the options.