6

I currently have an FM tuner hooked up to my desktop that I use to listen to the radio. Since my country is in the process of switching to the DAB+ standard, I was wondering whether there are any similar devices available for the newer radio standard that are compatible with Ubuntu.

A USB tuner would be good, but a PCIe or PCI card would be acceptable too. It'd be nice if the tuner provided access to the data services transmitted along with the audio (e.g. the name of the current program/song), and access to the audio bitstream (i.e. it doesn't decode the audio internally and feed it to the line-in jack of the sound card).

Zanna
  • 72,312
James Henstridge
  • 41,966

1 Answers1

3

I recommend you try any of the DAB+/DVB tuners based on the Realtek RTL2839U chipset (of which there are many); drivers for that chipset are actively developed in the community, by both people interested in the radio/TV aspect as well as people interested in the software-defined radio capabilities of the chip (it is capable of tuning to any signal between 64-1700 MHz with the appropriate antenna/software).

USB tuners are available which provide internal audio (as requested), and are capable of decoding metadata.

Here are some resources:

  1. Driver for 3.2 kernels; others are also available
  2. A popular USB DAB+ radio with the RTL2839U

  3. Other models which are verified to work with the driver in (1) are:

    DIKOM USB-DVBT HD (ID 1b80:d394)
NILOX DVB-T Stick N15 (ID 1b80:d393)
TRUST 16738 (ID 0bda:2832)
TERRATEC Cinergy T Stick BLACK (ID 0ccd:00a9)
TX Hollywood DVTB (ID 1d19:1101)
DIGIVOX mini II v3.0 (ID 1d19:1101)
  4. For even more compatible models, see this Ubuntu Forums thread
  5. Players that work with DAB+ include Kaffeine, as well as more general DVB players/applications.
ish
  • 141,990