I've been meaning to make a "GNU Radio in the Browser" (well, gnuradio-companion-like) for my RustRadio project to build flowgraphs without coding, but not gotten to it yet.
I tinkered with gnuradio back when rtl-sdr just took off (2012ish?).
I had no background in dsp or signal processing and found it so opaque as to be unusuable, even though I saw more skilled folks do amazing things with it.
I've tinkered with SDR some and did a bit professionally. I always found GNU Radio to fall into the uncanny valley - too GUI to scratch my programming itch but too low-level to be useful for exploration. Between libraries like `pyrtlsdr` and desktop apps like `sdrangel`, I can't seem to find a niche for GNU Radio.
I worked with GNU Radio quite a bit at one point a decade+ ago, even writing a custom C++ block, but I almost exclusively used it via Python rather than the GUI toolkit. I found it much quicker to mess around with flow graphs in code than their various UI frameworks, spawning windows as needed when plotting waveforms / spectra etc. The GUI as you said was too cumbersome.
I understand that they were trying to make a pretty complicated topic more approachable, but I always felt the push to GUI was misguided. Maybe they would have had more luck embracing the “S” in “SDR” and making programming languages the primary development paradigm.
Run through pysdr[0], which I found has the right complexity gradient and the right levels of abstraction for people with technical chops but who aren’t familiar with SDR
I've set off time to blog about getting my broadband RF scanner (connecting to USRP B200 via WebUSB) to work in WASM.
https://rf-survey.habets.se/
It's basically https://blog.habets.se/2026/08/Broadband-RF-scanner-revisite..., but in the browser.
I also have an AX.25 decoder (https://thomashabets.github.io/ruwasm/) and plain old FM receiver (https://cement.retrofitta.se/tmp/rtlsdr-fm/) already. The latter two work with RTL-SDR, also via WebUSB, so no software installs or setup required.
I've been meaning to make a "GNU Radio in the Browser" (well, gnuradio-companion-like) for my RustRadio project to build flowgraphs without coding, but not gotten to it yet.
I had no background in dsp or signal processing and found it so opaque as to be unusuable, even though I saw more skilled folks do amazing things with it.
*scratches head*
Might give it another go.
I understand that they were trying to make a pretty complicated topic more approachable, but I always felt the push to GUI was misguided. Maybe they would have had more luck embracing the “S” in “SDR” and making programming languages the primary development paradigm.
[0] https://www.pysdr.org/