Saturday 26 July 2014

RTL-SDR dongle's

Having fun with a dongle 

There are few things in this world that you can do on a budget. However the DVB Digital dongle is available on  amazon.co.uk  and on e-bay and most of them are capable of receiving from 24MHz to 1.4GHz . Now that PC 's and laptops have got good processing power,good sound cards and good graphics cards  it is now  possible to decode those invisible radio waves that are all around us , and to do that there are copious amounts of software out there to decode anything you can hear with a decent Arial, NOT I hasten to add  an antenna , with an Arial  you can receive on a wide band   like from say 28 to 30 MHz now that's a 2 meg band width  and is fine for listening, an antenna is tuned to transmit and receive on a very narrow band. Below is a screenshot of a program called HDSDR and it's quite an intuitive program easy  to use and easy to setup and gives you quite a nice display .




Tracking Aircraft

The fact that it can be used to  listen to  HF/VHF/UHF/SHF frequencies  is just icing on the cake.There are the ever popular RTL1090 that decodes the Mode -S from the aircraft, there is the very popular Plane Plotter, but you only have 21 days to use it  and this site here will help you to set it up.There is a program out there called adsbSCOPE and with it comes an alternative to RTL1090 ADSB# .I like that program  as its easy to set up and customize to your own liking  and below is a screen shot of mine. I don't recommend you take a laptop and dongle to the viewing gallery of any major airport as their security has a funny way of looking at it and could mean the confiscation of your equipment.



The location of my aerial and the receiver is in the town of Keighley and I am 8 floors up about 118 mtrs above sea level  the  I made the aerial with these plans here   and as you can see I was getting a lot of "hits".

Its not expensive and is quite interesting in an amateur radio kind of way ,and you don't need to be an amateur to understand how to set it up and operate it all. well I hope you like  this blog, please leave a comment .


(c) m1pac productions  2014 

1 comment:

Satscape said...

Great post Phil, I've been playing around with these too, seems like an amazing array of software to make it do all sorts of stuff.