Category Archives: SDR

RTL-SDR dsd tutorial: monitoring P25 digital voice

The crew over at RTL-SDR.com has posted a simple tutorial on using the RTL-SDR dongle and free SDR# and Digital Speech Decoder software (dsd) to monitor P25 digital radio voice comms. They describe, “Digital radio voice communications are becoming more commonly used in the radio spectrum. This is due to the various improvements offered over […]

Tutorial: receiving ACARS with RTL-SDR

This posting on RTL-SDR.com provides a good explanation of how to receive and decode the aeronautical digital communications known as Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS) generally found on 131.55 MHz. Their technique uses the RTL-SDR dongle tuned by SDR# which feeds into the decoding program. The tutorial also contains links to several videos […]

Authoritative GNU Radio training videos

Want free, in depth training on GNU Radio from an authoritative source? Then you’ll want to spend four hours viewing this series of videos by Tom Rondeau, KB3UKZ, the GNU Radio project manager since 2009. Tom provides a detailed, in-depth study of this Software Defined Radio experimental and development system. These videos are taken from […]

SDR Touch Android app for RTL-SDR

Here’s an app which purports to turn your radio equipped Android device into a SDR. It called SDR Touch and is available for free download from the developer’s website. According to the developers, its designed to work with the familiar RTL-SDR dongles, and Android 3.1 and up. According to the developer Martin Marinov the app: […]

RTL-SDR monitors ADS-B with ADSB# and adsbScope

Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) is a radio communications system used by aircraft worldwide to transmit position and identification information. It uses a frequency of 1090 MHz, sending data using a modulation scheme called Pulse Position Modulation (PPM). To monitor this system you could purchase a dedicated ADS-B receiver for several hundred dollars, or design your […]

RTL-SDR scanner

Al from Ear to Ear Oak has released this open source cross platform Python frequency scanning GUI for the OsmoSDR rtl-sdr library. The software scans a range of frequencies and plots the result, allowing you to find signals to investigate. The RTL dongle has a maximum bandwith of about 2.8MHz but with this you can […]

RTL-SDR spectrum analyzer on the Beaglebone

Alexandru Csete, amateur radio operator OZ9AEC, has developed this spectrum analyzer running on a Beaglebone dev board. He calls the project the rtlizer, designed to be a simple real-time spectrum analyzer that uses an RTL2832U DVB-T receiver (RTL-SDR USB stick) and runs on a Beaglebone, or any other device with librtlsdr and Gtk+ installed. You […]

Wireless Innovation Forum SDR design challenge

The Wireless Innovation Forum has announced they are accepting proposals for entry into their SDR design challenge. “Undergraduate and graduate students or teams of students, advised by a faculty member, are eligible and may propose and solve any problem related to SDR/CR/DSA. Senior capstone or graduate thesis projects, class projects, sponsored projects, and independent projects […]

DCC 2012: FlexRadio and SDR architecture

At the 31th Annual ARRL and TAPR Digital Communications Conference held last September in Atlanta, GA, FlexRadio VP Stephen Hicks N5AC gives an in depth presentation on SDR and its potential. He outlines his company’s new Flex 6000 series, a Linux based commercial product based on components used in government radios. While this is not […]

Toorcon: HackRF low cost SDR platform

At the recent Toorcon conference in San Diego, Michael Ossmann from GreatScottGadgets presented this talk providing details on his HackRF project which we covered in a recent post. In this video Michael presents an overview of the history of SDR and details on the development of the HackRF board. Visit the HackRF project page for […]

HackRF open source SDR

At the recently concluded Toorcon conference in San Diege, CA, developers Michael Ossmann and Jared Boone released the latest version of the HackRF board. “The HackRF project is developing an open source design for a low cost Software Defined Radio (SDR) transceiver platform. SDR technology allows a single piece of equipment to implement virtually any […]

GNU Radio internals – how to use the framework

The availability of inexpensive SDR hardware such as the RTL-SDR and Funcube Dongle help to focus interest on the GNU Radio open source signal processing software. In this video from CCC Camp 2011 Marius Ciepluch delivers a case-study on how to analyze 802.15.4 (alias Zigbee) with USRPs on a real-time protocol (for send time verification, […]

CSUN GNU Radio tutorials

GNU Radio is a free and open source software development toolkit that provides signal processing blocks to implement software radios. It runs on Linux machines and works with varied SDR hardware platforms from the $20 RTL-SDR through the $1,500+ USRP products. Many online tutorials we’ve read either take an overly simplistic approach, or assume that […]

Confusion over SDR# vs OpenSDRSharp

As you may have noted in our previous posts, there exists an excellent piece of software written for use with the RTL-SDR dongle known as SDR#. If you’ve tried it you know it’s incredibly user friendly and provides immediate, full-featured use of the RTL-SDR dongle out-of-the-box. The only downside, of course, is that it’s developed […]

Ettus LiveUSB SDR environment

Ettus, manufacturers of the USRP line of SDRs, has announced the availability of a customized bootable USB drive for USRP/GnuRadio development. The LiveUSB SDR Environment is a 16 GB USB 3.0 drive with Ubuntu 11.10 (64-bit), USRP Hardware Driver (UHD), GNU Radio, OpenBTS and associated documentation preinstalled. Ettus notes that this drive is compatible with […]

Decoding P25 with SDR#, DSD, and RTLSDR

This is another illustration of the amazing utility of the RTL-SDR and SDR# software. Here proct0r links the output from SDR# to a program known as DSD. DSD is an open source command line program originally coded in C by anonymous for Linux for the purpose of decoding digital protocols via a PC soundcard.

RTL-SDR and Backtrack5 R2

Inspired by the securestate article “All Your 900 MHz Are Belong to Us”, the hack4fun crew wondered about the potential for using the RTL-SDR dongle with Backtrack5 Linux distro. They were able to easily install the drivers and related software to use the RTL-SDR with GNU Radio and GNU Radio-companion and have written this article […]

Interesting radio frequency: pirates on SATCOM — 255 MHz

This video highlights another interesting frequency to try with your SDR dongle: 255 MHz. trylleklovn reports that, “Using gqrx with my newsky dvb-t dongle (rtlsdr) to listen to the geostationary SATCOM which is frequently utilized by Brazil radio pirates.” Gqrx is a free and open source SDR for Linux and Mac designed by amateur radio […]

Interesting radio frequency: ankle monitors on 314.2 MHz

Now that dongle-based SDRs are exploding in popularity, why not start exploring outside the usual frequency bands? With 64 to 1700+ MHz at your disposal there’s a lot of territory to cover. You’ll find that a number of unusual services occupy some of the lesser know bands not covered by conventional radio scanners. One example […]