Setting up ADALM-Pluto SDR with RF-Swift

In this post I’m going to walk through setting up an ADALM-Pluto Software Defined Radio with RF-Swift (https://rfswift.io/) on an Ubuntu Virtual Machine. We will begin from setting up a new Virtual Machine as if you are a total or near total beginner.

Let’s get to it:

1. Go to https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop and download the ISO. I’m choosing the Long Term Support (LTS) version as there’s no compelling reason to go to the short-term variant.
   

2. Verify the downloaded file hash. The Ubuntu website gives instructions for how to do this in linux.

In this case, I’m on a Windows host, so we will need to do something slightly different. Open up a PowerShell window and you can type Get-FileHash [Path to ISO File] to calculate the SHA-256 hash.

The file hash should match the one listed on the ubuntu website (shown in the second red box above after “echo”).

Here is an easy PowerShell one-liner to compare the two file hashes (Replace the text in brackets as appropriate):

Compare-Object (Get-FileHash [Path to ISO File]).Hash [Known good hash from webpage]

A successful match will return nothing to the terminal, as seen below:

3. Now that we have verified the ISO file, let’s setup a new VM. I’m using VMware Workstation 17 Pro. You can follow the new VM Wizard as seen below. I won’t screenshot every step in the wizard as most are self-explanatory. I will be giving my VM a few more resources than normal; I recommend increasing the hard drive size to 80 GB because some of the RF-Swift images are quite large. I’m also giving mine 4 processors and 8 GB of memory.

4. During the install, the Ubuntu installer may state that an update is available for the installer. Hit “Update now”.

If so, you will be prompted to close and re-launch the installer. Click the icon on your desktop to re-launch the installer.

Continue through the install process, then log in with the password you set during install.

5. Once inside, open a terminal and run sudo apt update and then sudo apt upgrade to upgrade any software to the latest version.

6. Download RF Swift and verify the installation.

Once updates are complete, open a browser and navigate to the current RF Swift repository at https://github.com/PentHertz/RF-Swift/releases. Download the appropriate version for your OS and architecture, in my case Linux x86_64.

Note the file hash in the second column. Verify the file hash of the .gz file with: echo "3dc66662f920c2acef7850986f66401a32d7a5b28c4a0867076b0f8c8e42b19e" rfswift_Linux_x86_64.tar.gz | sha256sum --check

Substitute in the hash from the website, being sure to remove the leading “sha256:”, and change the filename if you downloaded a different version). It should look something like this:

7. Install RF-Swift.

Unzip the archive with gunzip rfswift_Linux_x86_64.tar.gz and un-tar with tar -xvf rfswift_Linux_x86_64.tar.

Install with ./install.sh.

RF-Swift will ask several questions, including prompting you to install docker, prompting for a system-wide or user-only installation, and ask for an alias. For this we selected a system-wide installation and an alias of rfswift:

8. Download an RF-Swift Image.

Now you can run RF-Swift with rfswift, and run rfswift -h to display the help menu. But before we can do anything, we need to download an RF-Swift image to be able to create a container. We can list available images with rfswift images remote.

As you can see, there are a wealth of images. Each of these represents a docker container with a different collection of tools specialized for each specific task. Read more about how the images are organized here: https://rfswift.io/docs/guide/list-of-images

We want to use this container for a Software Defined Radio, so we are going to download the sdr_full image with sudo rfswift images pull -i sdr_full. (Running this command without sudo gave me a permissions error). Downloading the image may take some time.

I had two failed downloads, I believe because I ran out of disk space. Originally, I set this VM up with 40 GB of hard drive space, and at this point I had to go back and resize up to 80 GB. After that, it downloaded successfully.

9. Create a new container.

In RF-Swift we create a new container with the “run” command. In this case I’m going to create a new container using the sdr_full image I just downloaded, and name it “sensor1”.

rfswift run -i sdr_full -n sensor1

RF-Swift will create the container, then drop you inside it at a zsh terminal. RF-Swift will create the container, then drop you inside it at the zsh.

10. Connect the ADALM-Pluto.

Plug in the Adalm-Pluto’s power and USB ports to a power source and your computer respectively. If running in a VM like I am, you will probably get a pop-up asking if you want to connect the USB device to the host or a VM, choose your VM.

Run avahicontainer_start in RF-Swift to initialize the Avahi service. A more detailed explanation of this script is located in the official RF-Swift docs here: https://rfswift.io/docs/container_scripts/avahi_inside_container/

Verify that RF-Swift can see the SDR with iio_info -s, which is part the libiio library created by Analog Devices. (https://wiki.analog.com/resources/tools-software/linux-software/libiio) You should see something like the following.

Contexts 0 and 1 both refer to the ADALM-Pluto, which can be addressed via IPv4 or IPv6, and is also available via DNS at pluto.local.

11. Open your SDR software. In this example, I’m going to use SDR++ to connect to the Pluto. Open SDR++ at the command line in RF-Swift with sdrpp. You should see something like the following.

In the upper-left-hand corner, under “Source”, click the dropdown menu and select “PlutoSDR”. If the device is properly connected, you will see a name auto-populate in the next box down.

Clicking the play button will display our radio spectrum analyzer chart and waterfall graph.

How to use SDR++ is beyond the scope of this article, but if you’ve made it this far, then congrats, you’ve successfully got RF-Swift and your ADALM-Pluto up and running.

However, there are a few more steps we need to do to get full functionality out of this radio.

12. Manage PulseAudio/PipeWire for Container Sound.

From the RF-Swift Documentation:

Many RF tools like GQRX, SDR++, and SDRAngel produce audio output that requires proper configuration to be heard on your host system. RF Swift provides commands to manage the PulseAudio/PipeWire server for this purpose.

Without this step, you will not be able to use gqrx in RF-Swift, or hear the audio from SDR++ on your host.

To do this, we need to perform the following steps.

1. Exit your container (exit), then at the host’s command line update your package manager with sudo apt update.
2. Install Pulse Server with sudo apt install pulseaudio (The link above lists sudo apt install pulse-server, but in 2025 on Ubuntu that does nothing for me. Perhaps that was a deprecated command.)
3. Enable the module with rfswift host audio enable
4. Re-run your container with rfswift last (for the last container run) or rfswift exec -c [container_name] for any specific container.

You may also need to rerun the avahi_container start script after restarting the container.

If everything works, an easy test is tuning into a local FM radio station.