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Building a very low cost satellite tracker for your RTL-SDR
A satellite tracker is a motorized unit that points a directional antenna towards passing satellites. Most satellites are not in a fixed orbit, and will fly over your head a few times a day and will be...
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Decoding the NOAA Weather Satellite Telemetry Beacons
It is well known that the NOAA satellites broadcast weather satellite images which can be received and displayed with an RTL-SDR and computer. What is less known is that there is a telemetry beacon...
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Sniffing Data from an Implanted Heart Defibrillator
Over on Hackaday a team are attempting to reverse engineer the RF data logging portion of an implanted cardiac defibrillator (ICD) as their Hackaday prize entry. An ICD defibrillator works by...
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Multi-RTL: A GNU Radio Block for Combining and Time Synchronizing Multiple...
The RTL-SDR has a maximum available stable bandwidth of about 2.4 MHz. Many people have had the idea to combine multiple RTL-SDR dongles together to implement a wider band or multi channel RX device,...
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Comparing Home Made Inmarsat Antennas
Over on his blog “coolsdrstuff”, the author has uploaded a new post showing his comparisons of various home made Inmarsat antennas. In his post he tests a tin can helix antenna, a 10-turn helix...
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Testing a Prototype of the Outernet L-Band Downconverter
Outernet are a startup company that hope to revolutionize the way people in regions with no, poor or censored internet connectivity receive information. Their service is downlink only, and runs on C...
View ArticleL-Band Reception with an LNA4ALL, Patch Antenna and RTL-SDR
Over on YouTube Adam 9A4QV has uploaded a video showing how good L-band reception can be with only a cheap home made patch antenna, RTL-SDR dongle and LNA4ALL. The video is in response to a question on...
View ArticleMore L-Band Videos from 9A4QV: Testing 2x LNA4ALL + Filter + Patch, Receiving...
Adam 9A4QV has once again uploaded three new videos to YouTube, all related to L-band satellite reception. The first video shows how much L-band reception can be improved by using two LNA4ALL low noise...
View ArticleBuilding a DIY Powered USB Hub for using an RTL-SDR on a Raspberry Pi
One problem that sometimes arises when using embedded single board computers like the Raspberry Pi is that they often cannot provide enough current to power devices through the USB port. Over on...
View ArticleA Demonstration of the RTL-SDR Receiving WiFi and 2.4 GHz ISM with a Modded...
Back in April we posted about how KD0CQ found that he could receive signals up to 4.5 GHz with an RTL-SDR by using a $5 downconverter for DirecTV called the SUP-2400. The RTL-SDR can only receive up to...
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IF Average SDR# Plugin Updated
The IF Average tool is a RTL-SDR compatible plugin for SDR# which allows you to plot an average of the current spectrum shown in SDR#. This is especially useful for radio astronomers who often need to...
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Fan Cooling the RTL-SDR
Over on his Japanese blog Nobu has uploaded a post showing how he modified his RTL-SDR dongle to be air cooled via two small PC fans (post is in Japanese but can be read with Google Translate – right...
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Receiving WSPR with a Direct Sampling Modified RTL-SDR
Over on YouTube user Veryokay has uploaded a video showing how he was able to receive WSPR (Weak Signal Propagation Report) signals at 14 MHz with his direct sampling modified RTL-SDR. WSPR is a HF...
View ArticleRTL-SDR Stock Antenna Teardown and VNA Measurements
Over on his YouTube channel oh2ftg has uploaded two new RTL-SDR related videos. In the first video he does a tear down on the stock standard antennas that are supplied with most cheap RTL-SDR units. He...
View ArticleReverse Engineering a Commercial Inmarsat Front-End to use with the RTL-SDR
Over on his YouTube channel Adam 9A4QV has uploaded a video showing a commercial Inmarsat front end which he reverse engineered to use with his RTL-SDR. The front end is a duplexor, which allows both...
View ArticleRemote Spectrum Monitoring Drone with OpenWebRX, Raspberry Pi and an RTL-SDR
Recently Zoltan of rfsparkling.com wrote in to us to show us how he combined efforts with András (programmer of the OpenWebRX software) to create a proof of concept remote spectrum monitoring drone....
View ArticleUsing the SUP-2400 Downconverter with an LNA and RTL-SDR to Receive 2.4 GHz...
Earlier in June YouTube user T3CHNOTURK posted a video demonstrating him receiving signals above the maximum 1.7 GHz range of the RTL-SDR by using a modified SUP-2400 downconverter. Back in April it...
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Building a Quad RTL-SDR Receiver for Radio Astronomy
Amateur radio astronomer Peter W East has recently uploaded a new document to his website. The document details how he built a quad RTL-SDR based receiver for his radio astronomy experiments in...
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Instructions for Building a Portable Double Cross Antenna: Great for...
Over on Reddit user merg_flerg has uploaded an imgur post that carefully details a step by step guide for building a double cross antenna. A double cross antenna is great for reception of satellites...
View ArticleUniversity Course on Digital Signal Processing with the RTL-SDR
Over the past few years the Electrical Engineering department of the University of California, Berkley has been using RTL-SDR’s in their EE123 Digital Signal Processing (DSP) course. We’d posted about...
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