Yesterday we posted about the command line rtl_acars ACARS decoder. Today on YouTube, Pawel Janowski has posted a video showing how to download, compile and run the rtl_acars.c code on Linux.
Pawel has also posted the compilation instructions on his blog (in Polish but the console commands are easy to discern from the text).
On the Osmocom mailing list, Andreas has posted his work on a console based ACARS decoder for the RTL-SDR. Check out the mailing list thread here, and original post here. The second post on the thread shows how to compile it under Linux. Andreas writes
I have combined “rtl_fm” with Thierry Leconte’s (GPL’ed) acarsdec library code and created “rtl_acars” which can directly decode ACARS flight info messages to the console. Confirmed to compile on OSX 10.6 (not possible for me to check if it also compiles under Windows and *nix). Feel free to add it as another proof of concept to your distro unless you consider it too much of a quick&dirty hack.
Only the source code is available, and you will need to compile it yourself. The code can be found here.
YouTube user NeedSec has posted a useful tutorial video showing how to set up decoding of FLEX 1600 pager traffic on a Windows system using PDW, SDRSharp and an RTL-SDR USB stick.
In this video YouTube user feri67000 shows reception of a 10 GHz amateur beacon over 26km using the RTL-SDR, and an ‘Avenger LNBF‘, which we believe is this one which only costs $11. The LNB within the Avenger antenna converts the 10 GHz signal into a frequency that is receivable by the R820T RTL-SDR.
Also, in this video by YouTube user EA5KGD reception of a voice signal is shown using the RTL-SDR and Avenger LNBF.
Redhawk is a graphical signal processing application that is similar to GNURadio. YouTube user REDHAWKWaveforms has posted a video tutorial showing how to build a simple FM receiver using the RTL-SDR in Redhawk.
If you’ve been having trouble figuring out the use of SDRSharp plugins, YouTube user radiosification has put up a useful video tutorial showing the installation steps required to get set up with the popular SDRSharp fast scanner plugin (old link), which was also recently updated.
In the second video he shows the fast scanner in action on the airband.
For people already with expensive ham radios, the RTL-SDR can be used as a cheap panadapter. A panadapter is device that allows you to visually see the RF spectrum and waterfall being received by the ham radio. There are multiple (expensive) commercial panadapters available, but combined with a PC or laptop, the RTL-SDR will work just as well.
In this video YouTube user akdude47 shows a tutorial on setting up the RTL-SDR as a panadapter for a Yaesu FT-857. The setup involves connecting the IF output of the radio to the RTL-SDR, and putting in some settings into HDSDR.
In this video YouTube user Roland Zurmely (PY4ZBZ) shows communications with the FO-29 amateur satellite using his RTL-SDR and a 6 element UHF Yagi antenna. The Fuji-OSCAR-29 (FO-29 a.k.a JAS-2) is an amateur radio satellite that allows voice communication via single side band, and has a voice downlink frequency of 435.8 MHz and uplink frequency of 145.9 MHz.
In this video, the RTL-SDR was used as the satellite receiver, and a conventional FT857 radio with 4 element VHF Yagi was used to transmit to the satellite uplink.
