June 11, 2020

Trump Tweets about Pushed Buffalo Protestor Scanning to Jam Police Radios with an RTL-SDR and Android Phone

In political news 75 year old Buffalo protestor Martin Gugino has been generating controversy due to a video of him being pushed to the ground by a police officer, then subsequently lying motionless while bleeding from the head and being ignored by other officers.

Recently US president Donald Trump tweeted about a video news report by "One America News" (OAN) indicating that Gugino may have been trying to scan police with a "capture scanner". Whilst talking about the capture scanner they show an image of an RTL-SDR dongle and Android phone running the SDR Touch software. OAN go on to say that these capture scanners are designed to "skim microphones" in order to capture police communications, and are a tool commonly used by Antifa. Credit to @hackerfantastic for initially tweeting about the RTL-SDR being featured in the video.

Trump's tweet reads "Buffalo protester shoved by Police could be an ANTIFA provocateur. 75 year old Martin Gugino was pushed away after appearing to scan police communications in order to black out the equipment @OANN
I watched, he fell harder than was pushed. Was aiming scanner. Could be a set up?".

We're not entirely sure where this theory from OAN came from as there is no need to get so close in order to listen to police radio communications, since if unencrypted, they can be listened to from anywhere in the city. It's also unclear as to what microphones police would be using, and how these could be "skimmed" with an RTL-SDR. As for blacking out the equipment, an RTL-SDR cannot transmit so it would be impossible to use to jam the radios. An illegal jammer could be used after scanning, but police frequencies are already well known anyway, and there would be no need to scan for them so close even if low power comm links were used.

The video also shows that he appears to be filming police badge numbers with his phone before he was pushed, so it is unlikely that he was using an RTL-SDR and running SDR Touch at the same time as the camera app. No cables, antenna or dongle can be seen in the video either.

In the past we have seen a Slovenian researcher almost jailed for performing University research with an RTL-SDR, and a UN expert arrested for possessing an RTL-SDR in Tunisia. So this is a timely reminder to be careful as police and media do not always understand what an SDR is.

EDIT: Please note that this is not a political post or blog. We only post it to highlight the severe lack of understanding that can surround SDR and our technical hobbies. Comments inciting violence against protestors or anyone are NOT OK, and will be removed. Please keep discussions technical and civil in nature.

OAN indicates that Martin Gugino may have used an RTL-SDR on police — OAN indicates that Martin Gugino may have used an RTL-SDR "capture scanner" on police

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June 11, 2020

Imaging the Milky Way in Neutral Hydrogen with an RTL-SDR

Over on Facebook Job Geheniau has recently been sharing how he's taken an image of our galaxy (the Milky Way) with a radio telescope consisting of a 1.5 meter dish, RTL-SDR and a few filters and LNAs. In the past we've posted several times about others observing the Hydrogen line with an RTL-SDR, and we have a tutorial here showing how to observe it on a budget.

In this case, Job went a step further than just a single measurement. He used a used a motorized dish and RTL-SDR to scan the entire Milky Way over one month, resulting in a full radio image of the galaxy. As his posts and pdf document are on Facebook and not visible to those without Facebook accounts, we asked for permission to reproduce some of them here for all to see. We have also mirrored his PDF file here, which contains more information about his radio telescope, results and setup.

To make a very long story short. After a month of angel patience (and that says something to me) I managed to take a 'picture' of our entire galaxy (galaxy) in neutral hydrogen! I attach some pictures. If you are more interested, please come after this and PDF with explanation. It was a hell of a job I can tell you. But here's the ' picture s' of the house (230 million light years wide) in which we live and in which we all have a big mouth......

Hydrogen Line Image of the Milky Way produced by Job Geheniau

For the Scientists among us... a beautiful plot of the Milky Way Graphically explained in neutral hydrogen....... In short, summarized... if you look up on a beautiful summer evening you will see a beautiful galaxy, this is graphically the same but then on a different frequency than the eye can perceive. own dates of course.....

A composite of Hydrogen Line readings at different points of the Milky Way produced by Job Geheniau

An image of the Galactic Plane (longitude 20 to 240 steps of 5 degrees and latitude 0)

His setup consists of a 1.5m dish, extended to 1.9m with some mesh. A 1420 MHz tuned feed, Mini Circuits ZX6-P33ULN LNA, Bandpass Filter, NooElec SAWBird LNA, Bias-T, RTL-SDR V3, PST Rotator Dish Software, VIRGO software, SDR#, Cartes due Ciel sky chart and a home made netfilter.

He uses a modified version of the VIRGO software to read sky coordinates from a text file, and this points the telescope at each predefined coordinate. He then uses VIRGO to record data for 180 seconds before moving on to the next coordinate. The data is then plotted in Excel, and the highest peak is taken at each coordinate and put back into an 8x21 matrix in excel. Conditional formatting is then used to generate a color gradient resulting in a rough map. Then a Gaussian blur is applied, and it is projected over the Galaxy, resulting in the images above.

In the past we've seen a very similar project performed by Marcus Leech from ccera.ca. However, his measurements use 5 months of observations resulting in much higher resolution data.

The Hydrogen Line is an observable increase in RF power at 1420.4058 MHz created by Hydrogen atoms. It is most easily detected by pointing a directional antenna towards the Milky Way as there are many more hydrogen atoms in our own galaxy. This effect can be used to measure the shape and other properties of our own galaxy.

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June 10, 2020

A Self-Executable version of TempestSDR is now Available

TempestSDR is an open source tool made by Martin Marinov which allows you to use any SDR that has a supporting ExtIO (such as RTL-SDR, Airspy, SDRplay, HackRF) to receive the unintentional signals radiated from a screen, and turn that signal back into a live image. This can let you view what is on a screen through a wall without using any physical cables.

We first posted a demonstration of TempestSDR back in 2017 when we were finally able to get it to compile. Compiling the software took a fair amount of work for those without experience, and even running it was a chore. However, getting it to work is worth it as you can do some really interesting demonstrations.

However these problems are over and recently Erwin Ried @eried has made a self-executable version of TempestSDR. This means that no compilation, java installs, mingw or extra dlls are required to get the program to work as now it's just an exe that you can run. You will still need the appropriate ExtIO dlls for your SDR. The video in his twitter post shows it working with a HackRF.

For the people wanting to play with #TempestSDR (remote screen eavesdrop) I made a self-executable version that contains everything https://t.co/ybrRRJe4cE (no mingw/java/other dll bulls**t required) #SDR #hackrf pic.twitter.com/nw3fhFN7Ni
— Erwin Ried (@eried) June 5, 2020

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June 10, 2020

GR-HRPT: GNU Radio HRPT Decoder Blocks for NOAA, METEOR, MetOp and FengYun-3 Weather Satellites

Thank you to @Derek33197785 for writing in and highlighting @aang254's work on gr-hrpt, a GNU Radio 3.8 port of HRPT blocks from gr-noaa and other projects. These blocks are for decoding the HRPT signal from weather satellites like NOAA, METEOR, MetOP, and soon FengYun-3. @Derek33197785 writes to us:

[@aang254] made a custom HRPT decoder and ported HRPT blocks for NOAA, METEOR and MetOp to work with gnuradio 3.8 on Linux. Right now it is the only free and open source decoder for MetOp (that works), and he also thinks about implementing FengYun support. I tested the decoder and it works great.

He's also working on extracting the full data from HRPT, not just the AVHRR/MSU-GS imagery but also all the telemetry and other instrument data.

HRPT is a high resolution weather satellite image signal that is broadcast from the same NOAA satellites that provide the more commonly received low resolution APT images at 137 MHz. HRPT is also broadcast by the FengYun-3, Metop and Meteor satellites. However, HRPT transmits at 1.7 GHz, so a high gain dish antenna with motorized tracking mount (or hand guided tracking), LNA and a high bandwidth SDR like an Airspy is required to receive it.

A Metop HRPT Weather Satellite Image (resolution reduced). See @Derek33197785's twitter for the full resolution image. — A Metop HRPT Weather Satellite Image (resolution reduced). See @Derek33197785's twitter post for the full resolution image.

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June 9, 2020

Decoding HIRS Instrument Images from NOAA Weather Satellites

Thank you to Björn Schnabel who has written in to notify us about a website he's created for a program written by Zbigniew Sztanga called NOAA-HIRS-decoder which might be of interest to some RTL-SDR users. Most of us are familiar with the the ability to use an RTL-SDR to receive the APT signal on the NOAA 15/18/19 weather satellites. The APT signal provides a live image of the Earth. If you haven't tried to receive APT yet, we have a tutorial here.

Apart from APT there is also the HIRS instrument data which is transmitted in the Direct Sounding Broadcast (DSB) telemetry signal that is spaced at a slight offset from the APT frequency. According to NOAA, the HIRS instrument is "a discrete stepping, line-scan instrument designed to measure scene radiance in 20 spectral bands to permit the calculation of the vertical temperature profile from the Earth's surface to about 40 km". The SDR# screenshot below shows what the HIRS signal looks like, and to the sides you can see NOAA APT signals.

NOAA-HIRS-decoder makes use of the Project-Dessert-Tortoise NOAA satellite telemetry decoder that we posted about previously which can be used to decode data from most of the other scientific instruments on the NOAA satellites. The HIRS decoder by Zbigniew uses the raw text data produced by the Project-Dessert-Tortoise decoder and converts it into images. Full instructions on setting up the decoder on Windows is provided on the NOAA-HIRS-decoder website, just click the menu icon on the top right of the page, and go to "usage".

The received data contains 10 channels of long wave infrared, 9 channels of medium wave infrared, and one visible light measurement. The software will plot the 20 channels as images that are 56 pixels wide. This is not a high resolution picture, but it is nevertheless valuable data that can be used for scientific or weather prediction purposes.

All 20 NOAA HIRS Channels (Image enlarged from 56 pixels)

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June 8, 2020

TETRA-Kit: A New Open Source TETRA Decoder

Thank you to Larry for submitting information about his latest project called TETRA-Kit. TETRA-Kit is an extensible open source TETRA downlink decoder for Linux that makes use of GNU Radio as the first stage, so it should be compatible with any SDR supported by GNU Radio, including the RTL-SDR. Larry writes:

[TETRA-Kit] is inspired by a lot of existing stuff (see 'Previous work' in the project page) but started from scratch with those following ideas:

Stays as close as possible to TETRA specification layers defined in ETSI EN 300 392-2 v3.4.1 (2010-08)

Transmit downlink informations (including speech frames) in Json plain text format to be recorded or analyzed by an external program

Reassociate speech frames with a simple method based on associated caller id and usage marker (save messages transmitted simultaneously in separated files)

KISS

The decoder implements a soft synchronizer allowing missing frames (50 bursts) before loosing synchronization.

It consists in 3 parts:

A physical layer transforming PI/4 DQPSK rf signal to bits (RF frontend is NESDR at 2MBPS)

A decoder, which is the actual TETRA stack reading bits and transforming it to Json text

A recorder, which read Json stack output and reorder speech frames into separate files

The ETSI codec is also provided so unencrypted speech can be played.

Software is written in C++ and licensed under GPLv3 and use few external softwares with compatible licensing.

TETRA is a type of digital voice and trunked radio communications system that stands for “Terrestrial Trunked Radio”. It is used in many parts of the world, but not in the USA.

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June 8, 2020

OpenEar Updated to Version 1.6

The RTL-SDR compatible multi-mode digital decoder OpenEar has recently been updated to version 1.6. The latest version currently supports the decoding of FM/AM, TETRA, DMR, Pocsag and ADS-B. New features include a zoomable waterfall and other GUI and functionality improvements. The changelog reads:

6/4/2020
version 1.6.0
- saving last settings
- waterfall
- zoom on spectrum and waterfall with mouse wheel
- better list placement (pocsag & ads-b)
- wav(I/Q) loading (only 1024000 Sample/sec)
- voice volume & mute button
- spectrum range and offset
- rtl gain and correction (ppm)
- top menu
- frequency list
- some DMR improvement on SYNC detection
- solved center frequency issue (DC problem)
- and other few UI improvements

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June 8, 2020

Shiva DX Cluster For SWL/BCL with SDR-Console V3

Thank you to Walter Panella (IU2MEH) for submitting information about his Shiva DX Cluster software which is designed to be used with SDR-Console V3. A DX Cluster is a type of distributed network of software that is used to to advertise that long-distance amateur radio DX stations are transmitting. Walter writes:

Shiva DX Cluster connects to a ham radio dx cluster and repeat the dx spot to shiva clients while adding spots based on list files.

It doesn't send to ham radio dx cluster any spot nor it can receive any spot.

It is intended to use with SDR Console for SWL/BCL ( see screenshots folder ) so they are able to see broadcasting stations, for example, based on scheduling day and time.

Ham radio dx cluster spots are repeated to shiva clients immediately, broadcasting stations and other lists are sent to shiva clients every 10 minutes (default,configurable).

The software is available on Walter's GitHub.

Shiva DX Cluster running on SDR-Console V3

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