I’ve gone through these steps a couple of times when I’ve set up a new SD card, and had to go to various places to work out all the steps, so in case this is useful for someone else, here’s the steps (assuming installing on Rasbian):
Making and installing rtl-sdr from source
Instructions:Â http://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr
Pre-req steps, if you don’t already have the following:
sudo apt-get install cmake
#usb driver for the rtl dongle
sudo apt-get install libusb-1.0
Get the source:
git clone git://git.osmocom.org/rtl-sdr.git
Build:
cd rtl-sdr/
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ../
make
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig
If you get permissions errors like this when using any of the rtl_* commands:
Using device 0: Terratec T Stick PLUS
usb_open error -3
Please fix the device permissions, e.g. by installing the udev rules file rtl-sdr.rules
Failed to open rtlsdr device #0.
Then you should be able to add a line to
/etc/udev/rules.d/rtl-sdr.rules
 to set up correct permissions for your specific card, which you can find by running lsusb, eg for mine:
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0ccd:00d7 TerraTec Electronic GmbH
From this I believe you take the id value and insert it into a new line in rtl-sdr.rules like:
SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="0ccd", ATTRS{idProduct}=="00d7", MODE:="0666"
and then restart udev:
sudo service udev restart
… reboot and that should be fixed. Or you can still run the apps with sudo.
To test, try starting up the rtl_tcp server:
sudo rtl_tcp -a your_ip
and you might see a message about the device already in use by another kernel module:
Found 1 device(s):
 0: Realtek, RTL2838UHIDIR, SN: 00000001
Using device 0: Terratec T Stick PLUS
Kernel driver is active, or device is claimed by second instance of librtlsdr.
In the first case, please either detach or blacklist the kernel module
(dvb_usb_rtl28xxu), or enable automatic detaching at compile time.
usb_claim_interface error -6
Failed to open rtlsdr device #0.
This is saying dvb_usb_rtl28xxu is already using the device. From instructions here, you can temporarily unload this module:
sudo rmmod dvb_usb_rtl28xxu
or permantly remove it with a blacklist entry in /etc/modprobe.d – add a new file here named something like rtl-sdr.conf, add add one line with the name of the above driver:
blacklist dvb_usb_rtl28xxu
Reboot and now you should be good to go with the rtl_* commands.
Making and installing dump1090:
From https://github.com/MalcolmRobb/dump1090
git clone https://github.com/MalcolmRobb/dump1090.git
cd dump1090
make
Run in interactive mode:
./dump1090 --interactive
or net mode to enable the webserver (point a browser at you Pi’s IP address and port 8080):
./dump1090 --net
This year I worked a couple of hours over Sat and Sun, and got significantly more that my 8 QSOs last year, but nowhere close to K6Y’s score. I’ve submitted my log and will wait for the final scores to be published 🙂 All in all, had a good result this year!