Msi2500SDR

Project Msi2500SDR
Making an inexpensive MSI2500 software-defined-radio work on Linux
Status	In progress
Contact	bertrik
Last Update	2022-08-10

Introduction

This page is about an inexpensive SDR with MSI2500/MS101 chip, basically a chinese clone of the SDRPlay RSP1. It is in some places also referred to as BG7YZF.

Aliexpress link: https://nl.aliexpress.com/item/1005003654127606.html

On this page, I'm documenting how to get it to work effectively under Linux.

Hardware

blurry schematic

This device has the following properties:

• 5 separate SMA input for 5 different frequency bands
• USB-C interface to computer (USB high speed?)
• Samples radio at up to 8 MHz (?) and 12-bits
• Has a stable and accurate oscillator (TCXO), compared to (for example) the rtl-sdr

Software

Linux

This thing seems to be semi-supported by Linux:

• there are msi2500 and msi101 kernel drivers, generally it seems you should not use them
• supported by "soapysdr"
• supported by "gr-osmo"
• supported by "libmiri"

The thing that worked best for me, is the libmiri package by f4exb, together with SDR software sdrangel (also by f4exb)

Linux kernel driver

It appears that SDR is not usable with the default Linux kernel driver.

To uninstall it (and avoid automatically loading it), do the following:

• remove the modules manually

sudo modprobe -r msi2500 msi001
sudo modprobe

• create a file /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-msi.conf
• contents should be

blacklist msi001
blacklist msi2500

libmiri + sdrangel

For me (bertrik), using Debian (bookworm/sid) the following gives a usable SDR setup to play with:

Build and install libmiri by f4exb:

git clone https://github.com/f4exb/libmirisdr-4
cd libmirisdr-4
mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
nice make -j3
sudo make install

Build sdrangel by f4exb:

• install at least the following QT5 development packages (sudo apt install ...)

qtbase5-dev
qtbase5-private-dev
qtlocation5-dev
qtmultimedia5-dev
qtpositioning5-dev
qtwebengine5-dev
libqt5charts5-dev
libqt5serialport5-dev
libqt5texttospeech5-dev
libqt5websockets5-dev

• get the source at https://github.com/f4exb/sdrangel.git

 git clone https://github.com/f4exb/sdrangel.git

• build it

 cd sdrangel
 mkdir build
 cd build
 cmake ..
 make -j3