Back in November of last year we posted about Doug Haber’s gqrx-ghostbox which is software that turns your RTL-SDR into an electronic voice phenomenon (EVP) tool, or in other words a ‘ghost box’ or ‘spirit box’. A ghost box is essentially a device that rapidly tunes between broadcast radio stations, creating mismashed audio of multiple stations. Paranormal researchers believe that such a tool can be used to communicate with ghosts or spirits. Over on Amazon commercial ghost boxes/spirit boxes seem to retail for anywhere from $70 USD to $140 USD so an RTL-SDR can be a budget way to get into paranormal research.
Over on her blog paranormal investigator shielaaliens has uploaded a post and video demonstrating an RTL-SDR based ghost box in action. Sheila actually doesn’t use the grqx-ghostbox software, but instead she just uses SDR# with a frequency scanner plugin set to rapidly scan through the broadcast band. In the video she asks the SDR# ghost box a few control questions such as “can you say kitty cat” and “can you say Nantucket”. In response the SDR# ghost box appears to respond with those exact words. Her Facebook post with the video can be found here.
Of course this might all sound pretty far fetched for most readers of this blog, but it is an application that the RTL-SDR is now being used for nonetheless!