Using an SDRplay RSP2 to Measure IMD

Over on YouTube channel Rate My Radio has uploaded a set of three videos showing how to use an SDRplay RSP2 as a low cost spectrum analyzer to measure the inter modulation distortion (IMD) performance of lower end hardware TX capable radios. The test can only be performed on radios that have IMD performance less than that of the RSP2, so very high end amateur radios cannot be tested.

The process is to use audacity to play two audio tones into the transmitting radio under test, and then the SDRplay is used to receive the output. On the SDRuno software you're then able to see the third order and higher IMD products. Later he also performs white noise IMD tests as well. Below is the video description:

We cover 2 Tone Testing, White Noise Testing, and how the later can be particularly useful in terms of station monitoring. Naturally, we show the effects of 'all knobs to the right' :)

Jarrad also covers how with just an SDR Play and a 'rubber ducky' antenna, station performance can be monitored in real time.

Why would a Ham want to do this? The answer is simple: To defend their station performance against that on air Expert, who got their ticket when you needed to send CW at 50WPN, who served in the military radio unit for 20 years, has 3 engineering degrees and worked as a professor at both MIT and Havard, not to mention the times they lectured at Cambridge & Oxford.

With an SDR Play and a bit of simple math, any OM can put such experts in their place.

Below we only post the third video of the three part series. Links to Part 1 and Part 2 are available in those links, or on his channel.

Part 3: IMD Testing & Realtime Station Monitoring

Locating Various HF Transmitters and Number Stations with KiwiSDRs

If you weren't already aware, the KiwiSDR is a US$299 HF SDR that can monitor the entire 0 - 30 MHz band at once. It is designed to be web-based and shared, meaning that the KiwiSDR owner, or anyone that they've given access, can tune and listen to it via a web browser over the internet. Many public KiwiSDRs can be found and browsed from the list at sdr.hu.

One thing that KiwiSDRs have is a GPS input which allows the KiwiSDR to run from an accurate clock, as well as providing positional data. Time Difference of Arrival (TDoA) is a direction finding technique that relies on measuring the difference in time that a signal is received at over multiple receivers spread out over some distance. In order to do this an accurate clock that is synchronized with each receiver is required. GPS provides this and is able to accurately sync KiwiSDR clocks worldwide.

Over on his blog Christoph Mayer has been steadily documenting his work on getting Time Difference of Arrival (TDoA) direction finding to work with KiwiSDRs. This is not an easy task with HF signals, as they tend to bounce around and propagate through various means, meaning that signals can be delayed if not received directly. So far it appears that he's been most successful in locating signals received by ground wave, but he is also working with an ionospheric ray-tracing model and electron density data to take into account propagation delays from skywave propagation.

Skywave and Groundwave Propagation
Skywave and Groundwave Propagation

In one post from late last year Christoph shows that he was able to pinpoint the location of the German DCF77 longwave time station by using three KiwiSDRs spread out around Europe. The actual location of DCF77 is already known, so this shows that the technique actually works. Other posts show him locating transmitters for STANAG 4285, some unknown frequency hopping signals, OTH radar from Cyprus, CODAR, DRM, VOLMET and more.

Christophs' code can be found at https://github.com/hcab14/TDoA. According to users gathering the data and running the code is still a fairly elaborate process. But there is talk over on the KiwiSDR forums about eventually creating a server that would allow users to more easily request a location computation for a particular signal. 

Pinpointing DCF77 with KiwiSDRs
Pinpointing DCF77 with KiwiSDRs (Bottom right image shows pinpointed location)

Also related to this topic, priyom.org has been using KiwiSDRs to try and locate numbers stations. Numbers stations are mysterious voice stations on the HF bands that when transmitting read out a string of numbers. Most speculate that the numbers are some sort of code intended for international spy agents. Using a simpler method of just noting which KiwiSDRs in the world receive a particular numbers station more strongly, they've been able to determine the likely country of some well known stations.

Artificial Intelligence Radio – Transceiver Now Released for Crowdfunding

Last week we posted about the Artificial Intelligence Radio - Transceiver (AIR-T), which was awaiting release for crowdfunding. Today the Crowd Supply campaign for it has gone live

As expected, the AIR-T is not a cheap with it coming in at US$5,699, and this is with a 10% discount off the MSRP. However, the AIR-T is likely to be more of interest to high end industry and university researchers who have research money to spend. Also, compared to Ettus E310/N310 and LimeNET Mini SDRs which have built in non-GPU based computing platforms and similar SDR performance, the AIR-T could be seen as reasonably priced assuming that the software and drivers for it are decent. In the future we expect to see the price of similar SDR-AI development boards eventually reduce down to hobbyist level prices. 

The basic idea behind the AIR-T is to combine a 2x2 MIMO SDR transceiver with a NVIDIA Jetson TX2 GPU that can be used to run artificial intelligence (AI) software fast. They will include software that will allow GNU Radio and Python code to be easily ported to the GPU architecture. 

Why build tomorrow’s tech with yesterday’s signal processing tools? The Artificial Intelligence Radio - Transceiver (AIR-T) is a fully integrated, single-board, artificial intelligence equipped, software defined radio platform with continuous frequency coverage from 300 MHz to 6 GHz. Designed for new engineers with little wireless experience to advanced engineers and researchers who develop low-cost AI, deep learning, and high-performance wireless systems, AIR-T combines the AD9371 RFIC transceiver providing up to 2 x 2 MIMO of 100 MHz of receiving bandwidth, 100 MHz of transmitting bandwidth in an open and reprogrammable Xilinx 7 FPGA, with fast USB 3.0 connectivity.

The AIR-T has custom and open Ubuntu software and custom FPGA blocks interfacing with GNU Radio, allowing you to immediately begin developing without having to make changes to existing code. With 256 NVIDIA cores, you can develop and deploy your AI application on hardware without having to code CUDA or VHDL. Freed from the limited compute power of a single CPU, with AIR-T, you can get right to work pushing your telecom, defense, or wireless systems to the limit of what’s possible.

The Artificial Intelligence Receiver - Transceiver (AIR-T) SDR
The Artificial Intelligence Receiver - Transceiver (AIR-T) SDR

Building A Giant $200 3D Corner Reflector Antenna for GOES, Moon Bounce and Pulsar Detection

A corner reflector antenna is basically a monopole antenna with a metallic 'corner' reflector placed behind it. The reflector helps the monopole collect signals over a wider aperture resulting in signals coming in stronger from the direction that the corner is pointing at. In past posts we've seen a homemade tinfoil corner reflector used to improve reception of the generic stock RTL-SDR monopole antenna, and a larger one was used in a radio astronomy experiment to detect a pulsar with an RTL-SDR.

Recently The Thought Emporium YouTube channel has uploaded a video showing how to build a large 2 meter 3D corner reflector out of readily available metal conduit pipes and chicken wire. While the antenna has not been tested yet, they hope to be able to use it to receive weather satellite images from GOES-16, to receive moon bounce signals, to map the Hydrogen line and to detect pulsars. 

Tracking Police and Military Aircraft at the G7 Summit with an RTL-SDR

Back in early 2016 we posted about a journalist who used an RTL-SDR to gather ADS-B data about the type of aircraft used at the world economic forum in Davos. The idea was to help highlight the vast wealth and power of the attendees by showing off their heavy use of private aircraft.

Now more recently Laurent Bastien Corbeil has published a similar article in Motherboard (a Vice News tech magazine) explaining how he tracked police and military planes at this years G7 summit which was held in Canada in early June. Laurent used an RTL-SDR Blog V3 with the small dipole antenna attached to a window to gather ADS-B data from all the aircraft activity during the summit.

ADS-B is a radio system used on modern aircraft which broadcasts the aircraft's current GPS location and other data such as aircraft identifiers. It is now used extensively by air traffic controllers as it is significantly more reliable than traditional radar. With a simple RTL-SDR it is possible for anyone to track and plot ADS-B data on a map, and this is how tracking sites like flightradar24.com and flightaware.com work.

From his collected data he was able to spot several interesting aircraft such as Canadian Air Force Chinooks, C130 Hercules', RCMP Pilatus', a military Bombardier jet, and a coast guard Bell 427. He also notes that while he was able to spot Donald Trumps Marine One helicopter with his own eyes, the ADS-B data was not present, indicating that more important military aircraft do not broadcast ADS-B for security reasons.

In the article Laurent makes estimates of the costs of operating these aircraft, and makes some guesses on the type of mission flown by some of the aircraft.

G7 Aircraft Flight Costs (Data by Laurent Bastien Corbeil, Graphics by Marvin Lau)
G7 Aircraft Flight Costs (Data by Laurent Bastien Corbeil, Graphics by Marvin Lau)

Video Explaining the Basics of RF Bias Tees

Over on YouTube w2aew who has many excellent videos explaining various radio topics has uploaded a new video that talks about the basics of bias tees, and shows some applications and examples. In the video he demonstrates using a bias tee to add DC voltage to a serial signal, measure the RF performance of a BJT transistor, and to tune a remotely tunable 'screwdriver' antenna.

On receiver radios bias tees are commonly used to power remote LNA's (low noise amplifiers) or active antennas by putting DC power onto the coax cable. Ideally an LNA should be placed closer to the antenna as this will help reduce the loss caused by coax cable. Often the antenna is far away from the receiver on a roof or attic where there is no power supply. A bias tee solves that by allowing the coax cable to be used for DC power.

We note that our RTL-SDR Blog V3 dongle has a built in bias tee that can be activated in software. 

#284: Basics of RF Bias Tees including applications and examples

Notice: WXtoImg Website Down

Just a note that the website for the popular NOAA APT weather satellite decoding software WxtoImg is currently down, and may possibly never be revived. This software is commonly used with RTL-SDR dongles to download weather satellite images from the NOAA 15, 18 and 19 polar orbiting satellites.

It seems that the author of the software has not been maintaining the site and software for a while, although there was a brief update on the site back in 2017 when the professional version keys were released for free. But the keys reportedly no longer work. WXtoImg is closed source, so the code is not available either.

Some of the downloads are still available via archive.org, however it only seems to be the Windows and some of the Linux versions that were archived. Over on two Reddit threads [1] [2], some users are also collecting the last free versions and making them available for download again. If anyone has access to the last beta versions for ARM devices please upload them somewhere too.

Also if anyone happens to have the contact details of the author, or someone who knows the author please let us know as we'd like to ask for permission to mirror the files.

GQRX and gr-osmosdr now with support for SpyServer

Thanks to the work of Lucas Teske, GQRX is now able to connect to SpyServer servers. SpyServer is the IQ streaming server software solution developed by the Airspy SDR developers. It can support Airspy and RTL-SDR devices, and can be used to access these SDRs remotely over a network connection. It is similar to rtl_tcp, but a lot more efficient in terms of network usage, meaning that it performs well over an internet connection. On a previous post we have a tutorial about setting up a SpyServer with an RTL-SDR.

The code modified by Lucas is the gr-osmosdr module, and Lucas' code can be downloaded from his GitHub at github.com/racerxdl/gr-osmosdr. It doesn't yet appear to have been merged into the official osmocom branch. The gr-osmosdr module is a generic block used to access various SDR hardware, so any software that utilizes it (such as GNU Radio) should be able to connect to a SpyServer connection too.