Recently RTL-SDR.com reader DE8MSH wrote in to let us know about his experiments with receiving WSPR with his RTL-SDR. WSPR is an acronym for “weak signal propagation reporter” and is a software program and RF protocol designed for very weak signal radio communications between ham radio users. With less than 5W of transmitting power, a WSPR signal could potentially be copied all over the world.
To receive WSPR, DE8MSH used a direct sampling modified RTL-SDR dongle together with a 9:1 unun, 10m RG58 coax cable from RTL-SDR to unun and a 12m wire antenna outside his house. Then by using SDR# together with the WSPR software he is able to copy signals from all over Europe and Canada/USA from his home in Germany.
Some Received WSPR LocationsWSPR Report InformationThe WSPR Software
The guys at the AmateurRadio.com blog have teamed up with Nooelec to bring everyone a worldwide competition giveaway of 20 RTL-SDR prizes. The top prizes include the rare E4000 chip tuners, ham-it-up upconverters, adapters and aluminium enclosures while the regular prizes include an R820T2 RTL-SDR set.
To enter the competition all you need to do is leave a comment on their competition post. The competition is open for one week from 11 December 2014 to 18 December 2014. The complete list of prizes are quoted below.
Three (3) Complete NESDR XTR HF SDR packages including:
NESDR XTR SDR Set (E4000 chip)
Ham It Up upconverter
Upconverter Enclosure (silver)
Male MCX to male SMA pigtail (SDR cable)
Male SMA to female BNC adapter (antenna adapter) Estimated $129.95 value
Five (5) Complete NESDR Mini 2 HF packages including:
NESDR Mini 2 SDR set
Ham It Up upconverter
NESDR Mini 2 enclosure (silver)
Upconverter enclosure (silver)
Male MCX to male SMA pigtail (SDR cable)
Male SMA to female BNC adapter (antenna adapter) $111.95 value
BA5SBA, the creator of the Chinese direct sampling kit (and fully assembled version) recently wrote in to let us know about a product that he is now building. His new product is a fully assembled RTL-SDR + Upconverter. The upconverter design uses a DBM balanced ring mixer design which he writes makes less noise and has greater dynamic range. He also writes that compared to direct sampling the upconverter model should have greater sensitivity as it allows use of the R820T LNA. His design uses a 40 MHz local oscillator, comes with increased RF input protection and comes in an aluminium case.
The online store Nooelec has recently started selling two new RTL-SDR related products.
The first product is a lower cost RTL-SDR dongle with the E4000 tuner (ebay). The E4000 tuner was one of the original tuner chips used in RTL-SDR dongles when they were first discovered. Unfortunately Elonics, the company that owned the rights to the chip went under and the production of E4000 chips stopped, making them rare and expensive. The E4000 tuner has a tuning range of approximately 55 MHz – 2300 MHz, compared to the R820T tuner which has a range of around 24 – 1766 MHz. The cheaper R820T is better in most cases, but if you need the higher frequencies the E4000 may be an option. The new E4000 dongle is currently selling for around $50 USD, compared to the other E4000 models which went for around $100 USD.
E4000 Dongle from Nooelec
They have also begun selling a low cost 9:1 balun for about $10 USD (ebay) which can be used with a long wire (or random wire) antenna when receiving HF on the RTL-SDR with an upconverter. The impedance of a long wire antenna is approximately 450 Ohms (very approximate, impedance varies with frequency and length). A 9:1 balun allows a match with a 50 Ohm receiver, which is close enough to the 75 Ohm input of the RTL-SDR.
Over on YouTube user Samy Kamkar has uploaded a video showing how he was able to use an RTL-SDR to copy his friends wireless doorbell signal and prank him by replaying it using an Arduino and 433 MHz transmitter. His video goes through the entire reverse engineering process he used from recording the wireless doorbell signal with the RTL-SDR, to analyzing and understanding the signal and finally to programming the Arduino with the code to replicate the doorbell signal.
Over on the rtl-sdr.ru blog the programmer of many well used SDR# plugins has released a new one which allows you to have up to two extra VFO’s in SDR# (note in Russian, use Google Translate). In order words this means that you can now listen to up to three signals simultaneously if they are in the same swath of live bandwidth. Previously on Windows only the SDR-Radio V2 software was capable of doing multiple VFO’s.
Listening to multiple frequencies simultaneously has many uses including the ability to now monitor multiple ACARS, AIS, pager and other data frequencies at the same time. However, as of yet it seems that the ability to output to other audio devices such as a virtual audio cable is not yet implemented.
Over on YouTube user Mile Kokotov has uploaded two videos showing a comparison between the Airspy and RTL-SDR software defined radios. The Airspy is a high performance SDR that costs $199 USD.
The first video shows a comparison between the two SDR’s and two hardware radios on receiving a very weak broadcast FM station amongst several very strong ones. Mile first tested his hardware radios and found that his Onkyo radio was able to clearly receive the weak station, whilst his Pioneer radio could not at all. Then he tested his SDR’s and found that his Airspy was able to receive the station, but the RTL-SDR could not and suffered from intermodulation when the gain was turned up because of the nearby strong stations. This shows how the 12-bit Airspy ADC vs the 8-bit ADC on the RTL-SDR can make a difference.
The second video shows a comparison between the RTL-SDR and Airspy on a VLF time signal at 60 kHz using a ham-it-up upconverter. His video shows that the Airspy signal is about 8dB stronger the the RTL-SDR.
Keenerd (aka Kyle Keen) recently ran a fundraiser to support him to work on improving the RTL-SDR driver and related software. A few months ago he released an update to the driver which made some improvements including some tweaks by another programmer teejeez that optimized the R820T’s filters which may help with out of band aliasing. The list of issues he is working on and has completed can be found at http://igg.kmkeen.com/.
To use keenerds drivers on Windows with SDR# you can go to http://igg.kmkeen.com/builds/, and download the latest build zip file. Then simply copy all the non .exe files into the SDR# folder and rename librtlsdr.dll to rtlsdr.dll.
We recently tested the new drivers and show screenshots of the difference below. Nearby to the marine weather report frequency used in the screenshots is a very strong pager signal which causes significant interference. With the gain turned up on the original drivers the entire band is wiped out when the pager signal is transmitting. With keenerds drivers most of the band is usable and the weather signals can be heard. There do seem to be some issue with what looks like WFM interference appearing now however. Testing at other frequencies with nearby strong signals also seem to show that aliasing is significantly reduced.
We also noticed a lower noise floor at some frequencies resulting in about a 2-3 dB better signal. However, we also noticed that the noise floor was raised slightly at some other frequencies.
We suggest you give keenerds drivers a try and comment with any improvements or issues you see.
Over on YouTube user sm5bsz (aka Leif, programmer of Linrad) has uploaded a video showing an in depth technical comparison between the Airspy, Funecube, E4000 RTL-SDR and BladeRF software defined radios. His test focuses on the dynamic range when each SDR is used as a narrowband receiver at 144 MHz with appropriate filtering applied. The video is quite long and technical, but most of the results are summarized at 4:41.
On December 18 and 20 the International Space Station transmitted several SSTV images to celebrate what would have been the 80th birthday of Yuri Gagarin who was the first human to orbit the Earth. SSTV stands for Slow Scan Television and is a method for sending small low resolution images over radio.
Over on YouTube several RTL-SDR users captured these images. UltraTechie shows a video where he captures the SSTV image using a portable set up consisting of a Windows 8 tablet running SDR#. He used a handheld 3 element 2m Yagi antenna to tune into the 145.8 MHz signal. UltraTechie writes that he also used an LNA, but that it was probably not required as the signal was quite strong.
Another YouTube user Tom Mladenov shows another video where the SSTV image is received. Tom used a QFH antenna.
Chrome Radio Receiver has been updated and now supports NFM, AM, LSB and USB reception modes. The software can be downloaded for free from the Chrome store. Chrome Radio Receiver is a simple Javascript based RTL-SDR radio receiver without any spectrum or waterfall graphs. It is perfect for quickly listening to saved stations. The software also has the ability to record audio, save stations and automatically scan looking for active frequencies.
In order to receive AM/LSB/USB radio on HF frequencies you will need to use an upconverter and input the frequency offset in the settings menu.
Freqwatch is a new Linux based software program that has recently been released by programmer Joshua Davis. Freqwatch makes use of rtl_power to scan a wide swath of RF spectrum and then automatically records and stores in a database sound files of active signals by using rtl_fm. The software is capable of making use of multiple RTL-SDR dongles in order to efficiently monitor larger bandwidths.
After running the software for a while and generating a large database, you can then use a database analyzer like Splunk to find trends in the data or find out when something changes.
A few days ago the Chaos Communications Congress (a technology and hacking focused conference) commenced. Amongst the talks there was one about reverse engineering the Iridium satellite paging system using software defined radio. Iridium satellites provide global communications via special satellite phones, pagers and other transceivers.
In the talk the speaker shows how they used a USRP radio together with a cheap active iridium antenna, a bandpass filter and an LNA to receive the Iridium satellite signals. They also mention that an E4000 RTL-SDR together with an LNA and appropriate home made antenna for frequencies in the ~1.6 GHz region can also be sufficient.
Once they were able to receive signals they were then able to reverse engineer the signal and create several pieces of software to decode the pager messages. The code is available on their GitHub at https://github.com/muccc/iridium-toolkit.
Recently amateur radio hobbyist DE8MSH wrote in to let us know about how he was able to receive VLF (Very Low Frequency) signals using a very rare Refcom FC-VLF upconverter and his direct sampling modified RTL-SDR. His antenna is the PA0RDT mini whip which requires 12v of power that is delivered directly by the Refcom FC-VLF.
He writes that the Refcom upconverter is used to upconvert the 9 to 50 kHz range into the 14.009 to 14.050 MHz range which is receivable by a direct sampling modified RTL-SDR. Using this set up he was able to receive several VLF stations as shown on the waterfall image below.
15 – 70 kHz VLF Received with an Upconverter and Direct Sampling RTL-SDR
DE8MSH also writes
Note that I’m not living in a quiet area. As you can see there is a lot of men made noise like from tv sets, lights bulbs etc. pp. Some signals are not very strong becaus I switched the Refcom to 9-50kHz filter. So some stations above 50kHz could be stronger.
Below are some close up shots of VLF signals being received.
17 to 27 kHz37 to 47 kHz47 to 57 kHz67 to 77 kHz77 to 87 kHz
Over on YouTube user neutron2025 has uploaded some videos showing GQRX running on an Odroid C1. The Odroid C1 is a low cost ($35 USD) mini computer with an Arm Cortex A5 quad core CPU and 1 GB RAM which runs Ubuntu 14.04 or Android KitKat. It is a much more powerful competitor to the Raspberry Pi which also goes for around the same price.
Despite its low cost, the video by neutron2025 shows that the Odroid C1 has enough processing power to run the relatively CPU intensive GQRX SDR software with the RTL-SDR at a 1 MSPS sampling rate and maximum FFT resolution.
To install GQRX, GNU Radio also needs to be installed. Installation of GNU Radio is a lengthy process containing many writes to the file system. The amount of writes that occur could destroy a SDCard. To get around this neutron2025 connected an external hard drive and used that as a swap file while installing GNU Radio. His installation notes can be found on pastebin. He writes that installation took around 8 hours.
The SDR# plugins programmer over at rtl-sdr.ru has recently released a new plugin which allows the decoding of PAL / SECAM TV images from within SDR# (note link in Russian, use Google translate or see the download link at the bottom of the page). The author also writes that if you are using a newer software defined radio like an Airspy, you can also receive the audio channel using the SDR# multiple VFO plugin.
We note that there is also the TVSharp software by the same author which is a standalone program that can decode PAL and NTSC.
Over on YouTube user Tom Mladenov has recently been using his RTL-SDR to listen to EPIRB distress beacons transmitted by the SARSAT payload carried by the NOAA 18 satellite. To do this he uses a 6.5 turn helix antenna that is resonant on 1.5 GHz.
An EPIRB is a maritime device that is used to send out a distress beacon for vessels in serious trouble. The EPIRB beacon transmits data that contains GPS coordinates of the vessel at 403 MHz to the satellite. The data is then retransmitted to a mission control centre at 1.5 GHz.
Note that the professional version of MultiPSK can be used to decode EPIRB signals.
To decode the signal, DO2BJK took the usual steps of recording the signal and looking at the audio waveform in Audacity. From the waveform he was able to determine the bit string and discover the preamble, sync and data parts of a packet. He then used GNU Radio and wrote a Python program to receive the signal and automatically detect the preamble and extract the temperate data.
Over on YouTube user jdlucas78 has uploaded a video showing a P25 LSM modulated digital voice signal being decoded by the Osmocom OP25 software for Linux. Although DSD and DSD+ can decode P25 voice, it seems that the Osmocom OP25 software is better at decoding P25 signals as it implements better error correction algorithms.
Over on the RadioReference forums there is a thread discussing the use of the OP25 decoding software which can be found here. There is a post in the thread that shows an easy Linux install procedure for the OP25 software.
