My experience so far

[Dectman]

Not much info can be found on this great piece of software so here goes;

Installing; you probably get some errors about things missing. You will have to install them one by one (and probably have a bit of experience with Linux) until most errors are gone. Some errors might be harmless but some will prevent it from working correctly.

Tried it on raspberry Pi 3 1.2 Ghz (and OC'd to 1.4) and a 2.4 Ghz dual core 8 year old laptop but both can't handle it i think ("O" errors in the console which seem to mean the software is not processing fast enough). The 2.4 Ghz had less O's and it felt like it was almost fast enough, but not sure. Or maybe it failed because of USB 2.0 instead of 3 ? Not sure.

I am running it now on a quad core I7 4 Ghz. on a Linux virtual machine in Windows and it works. Getting uA errors but they seem less harmless (something about audio not being continuous i suspect). Using a HackRF as SDR. I have 2 cheap antenna's rated for high frequencies (1700 Mhz and above). Not sure if they differ much, still testing, but they seem to outperform my expensive antenna rated for lower frequencies so that is good.

Watch out because i think i blew up my Hackrf either by setting gains too high or too high gain in combination with antenna switching (there is an extra amplifier LNA RF Gain that operates a chip in the HackRF that can blow up). I usually keep the default settings with LNA on but watch out not to put that VGA BB gain too high. In fact, i changed that max setting in the top_block.py file to 42 and made it write protected (else it will get overwritten again by GNU radio) just to be sure. The only other thing i can think of is, that it happened when testing/switching different antenna's with max gains on and some static electricity or peak spike's. Not sure, just be careful.

I have roughly 33 signals around me and up till now i could listen to about 9 of them. Rest is encrypted in which case you hear a lot of scratching. Sometimes if signal is strong it actually helps the sound if you try lower some gains here or there. I noticed in Linux sometimes you think you have volume on 100 % but then when you go to the sound settings (in configuration) it can be set even higher (you sometimes need that with weak signals).

It tends to crash after a while (sometimes half an hour, sometimes longer) and i suspect some memory leakage here or there. Or sometimes 75 % of the signals seem suddenly gone. After a restart it works again. I don't know if this is the software or the virtual machine. Processor is quite busy and gets a bit warmer than normal (33 - 50 % usage).

I moved the carrier number selection box down close to the part selector so they are close together and easier to operate. That is about how far my programming skills reach :) It would be nice if the sliders were a bit closer together to make the window smaller, so it is easier to operate on a small (mobile) screen.

What would make the software perfect/complete is a scan start/hold button that makes it scan the carriers and automatically stops on a part that has a "V", maybe hold there for 2 seconds and continue (or optional just hold). Cherry on top would be recognizing if it is encrypted or not and leave those out or, probably simpler, a "temporarily lockout button" that would skip that (encrypted) ID number when scanning. That way you could do other things while scanning. I made Actiona (a linux macro recorder) do button-presses automatically every 0.5 seconds (down down down shift-tab) etc. That way it goes through all carriers and all parts so i have kind of a poor man's scanner but a real scan option would be much better. Unfortunately all i know is a bit of BASIC :) Hope this helps other users and my thanks to the Programmer.