The Outernet Dreamcatcher has recently gone on sale and is now only $39 USD. Previously it was priced at $79 and $59 USD. The Dreamcatcher is an RTL-SDR and computing board all built onto the same PCB. It has two SMA inputs - one is an L-band filtered and amplified input and the other is a standard wideband port good for all frequencies covered by a standard R820T2 RTL-SDR. For $39 it appears that you get the board itself, and a WiFi dongle, but no antennas, cables or SD cards are supplied with the unit.
In you are interested in the Dreamcatcher then back in June we posted a comprehensive review of it as well as their ceramic L-band patch antenna. Since then we've found that the Dreamcatcher is very useful for applications like setting up a dedicated ADS-B receiver/feeder. At this price the Dreamcatcher is even better value than using a Raspberry Pi 3 plus external RTL-SDR dongle which can end up costing over $60 USD.
According to Outernet stocks appear to be fairly limited so this price probably won't last for too long.
Thank you to an anonymous contributor for sharing his experiences with trying to receive satellite TV beacons with his RTL-SDR. Satellite TV is typically up at 10.7 to 11.7 GHz which is far too high for an RTL-SDR to receive. So to receive these frequencies with the RTL-SDR he uses a satellite TV LNB (an LNB is essentially a downconverter and satellite dish feed), a DIY Bias T and a 90 cm dish. He writes:
Almost all television satellites have a special frequency for transmitting a beacon signal. The beacon signal is a reference signal with fixed frequency, power and [maybe] without modulation that is sent usually by satellites. One of the most important techniques used for satellite wave propagation studies is satellite beacon signal measurement. (http://eej.aut.ac.ir/article_433.html)
I used an universal LNB, DIY bias-T and a fixed 90cm dish pointed at 26 degrees East. By connecting 18 volts DC to LNB I am able to activate the 9750 Mhz local oscillator and horizontal operating mode of LNB.
Means that anything received with LNB between 10.7-11.7 GHz can be easily seen in 950-1950 MHz range, using RTL-SDR.
It is useful for measuring attenuation caused by heavy rain in Ku band or accurate dish positioning or even measuring frequency drift in LNB local oscillator caused by wind and temp change during a timespan.
It seems that the right signal is Eutelsat 21B and left Es'hail 1.
In picture 4 signal captured immediately after turning on LNB. but all others are captured after at least 5 hours of warming up.
MAYBE oscillator needs a stabilize time or temp change may caused the drift.
If you are interested in receiving these beacons, Daniel Estevez has also performed similar experiments with his RTL-SDR and an LNB as well, and has written about it on his blog.
Below we show some images of beacons shown in SDR# that the anonymous contributor received with his setup.
The Fourier Transform is a fundamental concept when it comes to digital signal processing (DSP) and thus understanding how software defined radios like the RTL-SDR work. It is the key bit of maths behind the RF/waterfall spectrum displays and frequency selection features used on your SDR software. In basic terms all the Fourier Transform does is take a signal (for example an RF signal from an antenna, or a sound sample), and break it down into its component frequencies. This allows us to see each individual frequency spike in the RF/waterfall spectrum display in programs like SDR# from the mash of signals that arrive at the antenna. But understanding how the Fourier Transform does this can be a little tricky to understand.
3Blue1Brown is a very successful YouTuber whose channel is all about explaining complex mathematical concepts in an animated and easy to digest format. His latest video explains the Fourier Transform, and is a great starting point for those trying to learn DSP concepts. He focuses on audio frequencies as that is the most intuitive, but the exact same concepts can be applied to radio frequencies.
Most readers are familiar with the Raspberry Pi 3 and how it can be used with RTL-SDR applications such as ADS-B reception. However, one does not need to dedicate an entire Pi 3 to a single task as they are more than powerful enough to run multiple applications at once.
Over on his blog 'Radio for Everyone' Akos has uploaded a tutorial that shows how he set his Raspberry Pi 3 up as a simultaneous Network Attached Storage (NAS), Torrentbox and ADS-B server. A NAS is simply a hard drive or other data storage device that can be accessed easily over a network instead of having to be connected directly to a PC. A torrentbox is a device such as a Raspberry Pi 3 running torrent software so that you can download torrent files 24/7 without needing a PC on all the time.
Akos' tutorial shows how to set everything up from scratch, starting from writing the Raspbian SD Card and connecting to it via SSH. He then goes on to show how to install the torrent software, set up the NAS and finally set up ADS-B reception.
Thank you to Eddie MacDonald for submitting his new SDR# plugin to us via our forums. Eddie's plugin is called the 'Tuner Knob Plugin', and simply enables a visual tuner knob on the screen for adjusting the frequency. This plugin could be useful especially for those running SDR# on touchscreen tablets or laptops. To install the plugin copy the .dll file to the SDR# directory and copy and paste the magicline.txt into the plugins.xml file. We tested the plugin on our PC and found it to run well.
Programming the plugins is not so easy considering their is very little documentation and few examples on the net. There may be a few bugs I have not caught (but i hope i have caught them all.)
This DLL was compiled and tested on a Windows 7 x64 machine and the DLL is compiled for both x86 and x64 platforms. I have tested it on SDR# Version v1.0.0.1635
I am not certain which previous versions it may or may not run on. However, being built on the 4.6 .Net framework it should work with Win7 on.
I built this plugin because i got tired of holding down buttons and waiting for the frequency changes. I figured this was a simpler method (even though some people hate rotary style controls on windows) It works exceptionally well with a touch screen.
As previously mentioned in the forum post I created the 'remote' to test my programming for future plugins for DSP
While some may not find a use for the remote I made it this way for my wife who like to cruise the dial and just see what she can pick up.
Over on YouTube user Tech Minds has uploaded a useful video which shows how to set up DMR decoding with SDR#, VB-Cable, DSD+ and an RTL-SDR dongle. He also uses the DSD plugin for SDR# which makes controlling the command line DSD+ software a little easier. If you are interested we also have a short tutorial on DMR/P25 decoding available here. The video starts from downloading and installing the software, and explains every step very carefully, so it is a very good starting video for beginners.
DMR (aka MotoTRBO or TRBO) is a digital voice protocol used by Motorola radios. Software like DSD+ is required to listen to it, but it can only listen in if the signal is unencrypted.
Tech Minds has also uploaded several other tutorial videos to his channel over the last few months including guides on how to set up the ham-it-up upconverter, ADS-B tracking, using a Raspberry Pi to create a FM transmitter and more.
A few days ago Eddie MacDonald released his Tuner Knob plugin for SDR#. Today he's released a new plugin called "SDR# Dark Mode" over on our forums. This plugin is very simple in that is just makes the SDR# interface black, which should be better on the eyes those using the app at night. The plugin also adds two other options which allow you move the tuning toolbar to the bottom of the screen and remove all padding to save some screen space. The three options in the plugin are:
"Night Mode" or "Regular Mode" - allowing the app to be black or not "Bottom Tool Bar" - allows you to place the radio control tool bar on the top or bottom of the app "Remove Padding" - remove the 10px border around all the controls giving you a tiny amount of more workable space.
Over on his website P. Lutus has written up a useful article that introduces us to some common SDR hardware (RTL-SDRs, upconverters and the HackRF), mentions some common SDR software, and then dives into some SDR theory explaining concepts like the frequency domain and IQ sampling.
The theory sections in particular are explained quite intuitively with animated and interactive graphs that really help with visualizing the math. The explanations are short and not math heavy, so if you have half an hour you can learn some of the basic theory behind making SDRs work.
IQ Visualized on an interactive graph on P.Lutus' blog post.
Thanks to RTL-SDR.com reader Lee Donaghy for writing in and little us know that RTLSDR-Airband was recently updated to include SoapySDR support. This allows the software to now work with almost any SDR including the RTL-SDR, Airspy, SDRplay, HackRF, LimeSDR and more. They have also removed the 8-channels per device limitation and applied various bug fixes too. The full changelog is posted at the end of this post.
RTLSDR-Airband is a Linux based command line tool that allows you to simultaneously monitor multiple AM or FM channels per SDR within the same chunk of bandwidth. It is great for monitoring narrowband communications such as aircraft control and can be used to feed websites like liveatc.net, or for use with a Icecast server, or simply for continuously recording multiple channels to an MP3 file locally. It is also very useful for those running on low powered computing hardware who want software that uses less CPU power than a full GUI program like GQRX or CubicSDR.
Version 3.0.0 (Feb 10, 2018):
Major overhaul of the SDR input code - now it's modular and hardware-agnostic (no longer tightly coupled with librtlsdr).
Support for SoapySDR vendor-neutral SDR library - any SDR which has a plugin for SoapySDR shall now work in RTLSDR-Airband.
Support for Mirics DVB-T dongles via libmirisdr-4 library.
Support for RTLSDR is now optional and can be disabled at compilation stage.
Removed the 8-channels-per-device limit in multichannel mode.
Configurable per-device sampling rate.
Configurable FFT size.
Support for multibyte input samples.
Support for rawfile outputs (ie. writing raw I/Q data from a narrowband channel to a file for processing with other programs, line GNUradio or csdr).
INCOMPATIBLE CHANGE: removed rtlsdr_buffers global configuration option; buffer count can now be adjusted with a per-device "buffers" option.
INCOMPATIBLE CHANGE: removed syslog global configuration option; syslog logging is now enabled by default, both in foreground and background mode. To force logging to standard error, use -e command line option.
Added -F command line option for better cooperation with systemd. Runs the program in foreground, but without textual waterfalls. Together with -e it allows running rtl_airband as a service of type "simple" under systemd. Example rtl_airband.service file has been adjusted to reflect this change.
Added type device configuration option. It sets the device type (ie. the input driver which shall be used to talk to the device). "rtlsdr" is assumed as a default type for backward compatibility. If RTLSDR support has been disabled at compilation stage, then there is no default type - it must be set manually, or the program will throw an error on startup.
Frequencies in the config can now be expressed in Hz, kHz, MHz or GHz for improved readability.
Recently Eddie MacDonald has been pumping out simple but useful plugins for SDR# including the SDR# Dark Mode and Visual Tuner Knob plugins. Recently he released a new plugin called "FFT Window Screen Grabber". This plugin simply helps you to easily take a screenshot of the FFT and waterfall displays in SDR#. It could be a useful plugin if you are constantly finding interesting signals that you want to document, or upload to sigidwiki.com.
Over on the YouTube channel Tech Minds the presenter has uploaded two new RTL-SDR based tutorial videos. The first video gives a bit of background and shows how to decode Morse code with an RTL-SDR. He uses SDR-Console V3 and the Morse code decoder CwGet. With this he's able to decode a few calls from some ham radio operators.
In the second video Tech Minds shows how to decode Weather Fax with the RTL-SDR. Weather faxes are images of weather charts sent over HF frequencies. In the video he uses SDR-Console and SeaTTY to do the decoding and demonstrates reception of an example fax.
Jon Hudson, head of marketing at SDRplay has recently released a helpful tutorial that shows how to access remote servers in SDR-Console V3, and also how to set up your own server too. As you may already know, SDR-Console V3 provides a remote server platform which allows you to access all sorts of SDR hardware remotely over a network connection or over the internet. Some SDR hardware owners even opt to share their radio hardware publicly over the internet for anyone to access. The video description reads:
This video is a screen-by-screen guide to both accessing, and setting up your own, remote SDR radio using the new (Feb 2018) SDR Console V3 software from SDR-Radio. Although the guide uses an RSP2 from SDRplay, this will work with all the popular SDRs
Please note - you need to have a good internet connection since (unlike in V2), the entire I/Q data is being sent over the internet. This also limits how much visual bandwidth you are can see at any one time.
SOME IMPORTANT WARNINGS IF YOU ARE ADDING YOUR OWN SDR! Be careful not to plug multiple SDRs into a single USB2 socket - for multiple SDRs, you may need a powered hub ( like this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/UGREEN-Adapt... )
Once you are up and running - please go to http://www.sdr-radio.com/Software/Ver... and view your listing - if there is a yellow triangle, then you are not accessible outside your own firewall - attention is needed! Just because you can access it on your own LAN doesn't mean it's accessible via the internet!!!
The RSP family of SDRs from SDRplay cover 1kHz to 2 GHz with no gaps and give up to 10MHz spectrum visibility.
Jon's video first shows how to use SDR-Console V3 to access those publicly shared SDR radios over the internet. The second part of the video demonstrates how to set up your own server that you can use remotely for personal use, or to share over the internet.
The SDR-Console V3 server accepts various kinds of SDR hardware including RTL-SDR, Airspy, SDRplay, HackRF, Elad, LimeSDR and many more SDR units so this is a good way to explore various types of hardware, or simply to explore signals from different areas around the world.
WSPR (pronounced "Whisper") is short for Weak Signal Propagation Reporting, and is a HF ham mode typically run on very low power levels such as 1W. The data from WSPR reception can be used to determine how good or bad HF propagation is currently around the world as each WSPR message contains a callsign, 6-digit locator and the transmit power level used. Received messages are all reported to the internet and can be viewed on an online map at http://wsprnet.org/drupal/wsprnet/map.
With an RTL-SDR V3 running in direct sampling mode it is possible to receive and decode these messages on a Raspberry Pi 3 using the WSPRD software.
Over on his website IT9YBG has uploaded a tutorial for a method that allows the WSPRD software to automatically change bands depending on the time of day. The method simply uses the crontab in Linux to automatically run a script that stops and then restarts WSPRD on a new frequency at certain times of the day. This is useful because different WSPR bands tend to become active at different times of the day due to changing HF propagation conditions.
WSPR messages received by IT9YBG from all over the world.
Back in September 2017 we posted about the start of a MOOC (massive open online course) run by Juan Moreno and some collegues from the Technical University of Madrid that aims to introduce students to DSP techniques and MATLAB using an RTL-SDR. The original course has already finished, but Juan has written in noting that the second run of the course is scheduled to start on March 12 2018. The course if free and if you are interested be sure to register on their website. Note that while the registration forms are in Spanish & Portuguese, the course itself is presented in English.
One useful improvement from the first course is that Mathworks, the company behind MATLAB have agreed to provide a free MATLAB licence to all students for the duration of the course. This should significantly lower the cost barriers to learning.
The course blurb reads:
SDR is a reality around us. It is present in a lot of systems everywhere and is a versatile technology which can be used for many things (not only academics and industrial). The purpose of this course is to introduce students into general-purpose SDR tools. The SDR hardware platform chosen for this course is the RTL-SDR. It is worldwide available, it’s cheap ($15) and there is a lot of help in the Internet. But, as far as we know, there is no other MOOC focused on an introduction to SDR as this MOOC. Here we will not only learn about SDR but also a lot of related areas like antennas, digital signal processing, radio frequency and communication electronics.
Recently we've posted about Eddie MacDonald's several releases of new plugins for the popular SDR# software. Recently he's released a tuner knob plugin which provides a visual frequency tuning knob that is useful for those running on touchscreen hardware, a 'dark mode' plugin which reduces the brightness of SDR# and compresses the UI a little, and an FFT grabber plugin which allows for easy screenshots of the FFT and waterfall spectrum's to be taken.
Eddie notes that all his plugins now have an actual home website at https://sdrplugins.com. This is where he will release updates and new plugins from now on.
If you are interested in discovering more SDR# plugins, we have a large list available here.
A "Ghost Box" or "Spirit Box" is a tool used by paranormal investigators to talk with spirits via the claimed electronic voice phenomenon (EVP). Some believers in paranormal activity theorize that electronic radio devices or EM fields are susceptible to manipulation by other worldly spirits, and thus this can be used as a communications method. A Ghost Box is a radio device that rapidly tunes through broadcast FM radio stations, hoping to catch EVP replies by spirits from questions asked.
In the past we've seen that the RTL-SDR has been used for this purpose with the gqrx-ghostbox software. However as gqrx-ghostbox only runs on Linux, EVP researcher 'Capt Zeanie' decided to create 'GhostSDR' which is a ghostbox program that works with SDR# in Windows. The software interfaces with SDR# via the Remote Net SDR# plugin which allows SDR# to be controlled via a network connection. Note that when we tried to run it we got an invalid memory error, so it might still be a little buggy. If you have problems you can contact Zeanie over on our forums, where he has posted the following:
This is my version of a Spirit Box or Ghost Box but using a V3 instead of a complete handheld radio as these modified are quite expensive.
I use SDR# and the main application to interface with the V3, and I also use the Net Remote Plugin which allows me to control SDR# from my software.
A Ghost Box is a radio that is modified to quickly scan through the frequencies without stopping on an particular signal. So essentially it skips between frequencies. This supposedly help spirits be able to speak through the white noise etc. Any TV Paranormal show has one..
I have been researching EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomenon) and trying for over 2 years to see if EVP actually exists. As of yet after 100's of hours of recording on various equipment I have not had anything really come through. In EVP terms I am talking about Class A to Class B EVP's (ie loud and clear).
I started this research into EVP 2 years ago after my Father-in-law passed away at his home. A few months later Mother-in-law saw a man in a brown suit appear in her bedroom whilst getting into bed, after 10-15secs he just faded away. Now my Mother-in-law is trustworthy and does not lie, so I thought with my interest in the paranormal and my long experience with working in IT I thought I could try and see for myself and ended up being more interested in EVP's.
So to help me create a Ghost Box I have written GhostSDR
A pre-bought modified Ghost Box just usually scans through the AM or FM bands, whereas GhostSDR allow you to choose which frequencies you want to use, you are only limited to the capabilities of your chosen SDR Device (ie V3)
My software allows a user to create various frequency lists that has a starting Frequency, Ending Frequency, Skip frequency and bandwidth. ie Start at 72MHz, ending at 108MHz, skipping xxHz and using a user selectable bandwidth. It will sequential skip through the frequencies of be totally random (which modified handheld Ghost Boxes can not do)
There are few more features to add over time but I am trying this version for a few months before tweaking/adding things.
Last week we posted about the release of a new TETRA decoder plugin for SDR#. The plugin made setting up a TETRA decoder significantly easier compared to previous methods, but it still required the installation and use of the MSYS2 environment on Windows.
Thanks to reader Zlati for letting us know that the TETRA plugin has recently been updated once again and now no longer requires MSYS2 to be installed first. Now it is as easy to install as any other plugin, just drop the .dlls into the SDR# folder and add the magicline to the plugins.xml file. We tested it out and decoding worked fine. At the moment the "Net info" button is not working however.
In the future news and download lines for newer versions will probably be available on the programmers radioscanner.ru forum thread which is available here (use Google Translate to read): http://www.radioscanner.ru/forum/topic50051-9.html
Over on YouTube content creator Tech Minds continues to upload informative RTL-SDR based videos, this time discussing SELCAL and the HF Air Band. For international flights it is common for aircraft to communicate with ground controllers and the parent company via the HF bands.
As radio communications are sparse, and the pilots obviously don't want to monitor noisy HF static for the entirely journey a system is required for signalling pilots when a ground station wishes to communicate with them. The system in use today is SELCAL which simply consists of transmitting a set of tones unique to an aircraft. When a correct SELCAL tone is received the aircraft system alerts the pilots that a radio voice communication is about to come through, allowing them time to get the radio in operation.
Tech Minds' video explains this in a bit more detail, and shows some examples of HF air comms with SELCAL tones played.
The R820T2 is the main tuner chip used in most RTL-SDR dongles. Several months ago Rafael Micro ceased regular production of their R820T2 chip, and the older R820T has also been discontinued for some time too.
However, Rafael are still producing new quality R820T2 chips for factories if they make very large bulk orders. Since it is one Chinese manufacturer producing all of RTL-SDR.com V3, NooElec, FlightAware and most generically branded dongles, the volume restriction is not a problem for them as long as the RTL-SDR is still in demand. So most dongles using R820T2 RTL-SDRs should be able to continue business as usual for the forseeable future. But we have also recently seen that a lot of generically branded RTL-SDR dongles presumably produced at other factories have started to ship with the less desirable FC0012/13 tuner chips instead.
The R820T chip is already 8 years old, and the R820T2 has been around for the last two years. The R820T2 was a slight improvement on the R820T, due to a higher quality manufacturing process used to produce it. The change in manufacturing process resulted in mostly higher yields, less chip-to-chip variance, better sensitivity, reduced L-band heat VCO lock issues, and wider filters.
Recently the Airspy team announced the likely early retirement of their Airspy One and R2 line of products. These are SDRs that used the R820T2 tuner chip combined with a 12-bit ADC, allowing for significantly better performance compared to an RTL-SDR. It seems that they were able to acquire R820T2 chips from a distributor, but the stock proved to be very low yield. Possibly once discontinued a lot of low quality chips were dumped onto the distributors for final sale. They write:
I have some bad news. Rafael Micro officially discontinued the R820T2 since a few months. This is the tuner we use in the Airspy R2 and Airspy Mini.
We tried to secure an extra batch from Rafael (even at a higher price) but the quality of the silicon of the samples we received wasn't very good and most units didn't pass our automated QA tests. Sacrificing the performance is out of question. The alternatives proposed by Rafael are not pin compatible and require both a significant hardware redesign and new tuner control code - and this is a large investment with very little guarantees on the final result.
I can say this has been one of the longest running designs that resisted the new silicon tuner SDR's popping in and out while setting a standard for performance and price.
For now, our distributors are running out of R2/Mini's very quickly and, until a final solution is found or a new replacement is designed, there won't be any new batches out.
I was checking my notes for alternatives to the current Airspy R2/Mini design and wondered if consulting the community would give some constructive input. As the market is already crowded with low cost receivers and transceivers, but yet Icom manages to sell a 4 figures SDR, I was thinking of making something that is as open as possible for extensions and work good enough for the most demanding operators and pro's, all while being affordable.
The idea is to replace the R820T2 tuner with one of its latest high performance siblings, then replace the old LPC4370 with the brand new i.MX RT1020. This MCU can be interfaced with a good ADC and has enough processing power for oversampling and decimation through the Cortex M7 core, which will bring the final resolution higher. The general goals:
Better RX performance than the general purpose low cost silicon transceivers
12 bit RX at 10MHz bw and up to 16bit at narrow band
Coverage from 30 MHz to 1.8 GHz or more
Switched pre-selectors
Open source
Same form factor as the Airspy HF+ (same box actually)
Leverage the RF manufacturing and testing capability developed at Itead Studio
Affordable
So in conclusion there is no need to panic buy R820T2 RTL-SDRs as production will continue as per normal for the forseeable future as the RTL-SDR demand is high enough for factories to make large bulk orders of new R820T2 chips. Even if the R820T2 is fully discontinued, there are alternative tuners with the same performance that we can switch to after a minor redesign.
Note that we're currently out of stock of RTL-SDR V3's on Amazon and low in stock on our store but this is not related to R820T2, but rather simply shipping delays. We should be fully back in stock within a few weeks.
Fosdem 2017 and 2018 were conferences on software development that occurred on 4 & 5 February 2017 and 3 & 4 February 2018. The conference features several software defined radio and RTL-SDR based talks which appear to have recently been uploaded to YouTube. Below we're posting some of our favorite SDR related talks, but the full video list can be found here, and here is the SDR playlist from Fosdem 2018.
(Yet another) passive RADAR using DVB-T receiver and SDR
by Jean-Michel Friedt @ FOSDEM 2018
In this presentation Jean-Michel shows a GNU Radio passive radar implementation utilizing two coherent RTL-SDR dongles. During the talk he demonstrates his results with RTL-SDR passive radar operating on planes, boats and cars.
by Martin Braun and Sue Ann Heatherly @ FOSDEM 2018
In this talk Martin and Sue discuss how amateur radio astronomy can be performed using lost cost software defined radio tools such as an RTL-SDR. They show how to receive solar flares and detect the 21cm hydrogen line and focus on showing how easy it can be to do these projects in a classroom environment.
Claim Space, the Libre Way, using SDRs
by Manolis Surligas @ FOSDEM 2018
In this talk Manolis from the Libre Space Foundation and SatNOGs discusses how they use RTL-SDR's and other SDR's in their volunteer run network of satellite ground stations to create an online database of received satellite data.
Receiving Wireless Mobile Traffic Lights
by Bastian Bloessl @ FOSDEM 2017
Wireless mobile traffic lights are often used to secure construction sites when roads are partially blocked. Some day, when a pair of them was placed close to our home, I set off to explore how they are working. In this talk, I will describe how I used a cheap RTL-SDR together with GQRX, Inspectrum, and GNU Radio to reverse engineer the modulation and frame format of different types of wireless traffic lights. With some patience, I could also make some sense out of the bits. In particular, I was able to extract the signal state and display it in a web interface, mirroring the traffic light. A closer look at the frame format and the apparent absence of any authentication might leave one with a bit of a worrying impression regarding the security of those systems.
