Talking to Ghosts with an RTL-SDR Dongle

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!

Software Defined Radio (SDR) Ghost BOX

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Quarinteen

An SDR dongle can NOT be used for MITM attacks of ANY kind because it does not have the capability of broadcasting. You can intercept any of those signals, and decrypt them if you know what the signal is. But in no way can you interact with out broadcast capabilities. None of these cheap SDR dongles are capable of transmission.

B.Meara

best sdr based joke ive seen yet. tnx fer for the laughs Sheila!

-B. Meara, smoke n mirrors, solder n ego

Sheila

I hadn’t realized you had written this article about my use of the SDR as a ghost box. Thanks 🙂 I’m not sure if it’s ghosts or some other type of mental phenomena with the electronics, but it does indeed seem to respond intelligently.

~Sheila
@sheilaaliens on Twitter

jay

is this how gang stalking is done?

Sheila

The SDR dongle can be used for a plethora of things including setting up a fake cell phone tower to capture people’s call and text logs etc. I suppose it could be used for gang stalking in any number of ways.

KD0CQ

I hear bumper music to Art Bell’s show playing somewhere.

Kirk

Lulz