Over on YouTube use radiosification has uploaded a video showing the Windows TETRA decoder ‘wintelive’ in action. Wintelive is a Windows port of the popular RTL-SDR compatible Linux based ‘telive’ TETRA decoder. Back in October 2016 we posted about its release and we have a tutorial for telive and the RTL-SDR available here.
The install instructions for wintelive are available on the authors webserver.
Recently a reader of RTL-SDR.com wrote in and submitted a link to T——–o SDR, which is an RTL-SDR compatible multimode SDR decoder program for Windows. (The website is in Italian but is easily translated with Google Translate). In terms of operation it appears to be quite similar to SDR#, and other programs like SDR-Console and HDSDR.
Like all other general purpose receiver software it is capable of decoding NFM/AM/WFM/SSB/CW modes. It also has digital noise reduction built in as well as an S-Meter and frequency manager list.
Update: Unfortunately we have been informed by the developer of SDR# that this software was illegally decompiled from a relatively new SDR# version and is thus stolen work. We looked further into the software and it is essentially an exact clone of SDR#, just with a different skin. Please do not use this software, and respect software legality.
Essentially it appears that they took the closed source SDR# program, decompiled it then reskinned it and then made it open source under a new name.
Obviously this is unacceptable behavior, so out of respect for the original SDR# developers hard work we’ve removed links and references to this software on our website.
The R820T2 is the tuner chip used on most RTL-SDR dongles. It is also used on the Airspy, a more advanced higher end SDR. All in all, it is a very good tuner chip, but it is mostly limited by the low-bit ADC on the RTL2832U chip in the RTL-SDR.
We’ve just been informed that there is now a custom DIY breakout board available for the R820T chip which is made by Eric Brombaugh who is an SDR experimenter. This is great for those wishing to do home brew SDR experiments with the R820T2 chip, for example you could perhaps implement your own SDR with a higher end ADC chip on a development boards.
The breakout board is essentially the exact implementation which is shown in the R820T datasheet. It is available as a 4-layer PCB on Osh Park and it “provides a simple 4-pin interface with power, ground and I2C bus for controlling the tuner. A broad-band RF input and 10MHz IF output are provided on SMA connectors.” Eric has also provided us with a simplified driver based on the Airspy and Linux media driver code which allows you to control the R820T2 from an STM32F0xx processor.
Recently RTL-SDR.com reader Mark wrote in and wanted to share his modified version of otti-soft’s GNU Radio flowgraph for decoding Meteor-M2 weather satellite images on Linux. The modified version allows for real time decoding, whereas the original version requires several offline decoding steps to be performed after recording the signal.
Mark writes:
I have modified one of otti-soft’s gnuradio flowgraphs so that they work with RTL-SDR and output the demodulated symbols to a TCP socket, from which the new version of LRPT Analizer (from robonuka.ru) can decode the data in real-time.
First, one needs to download and extract the AMIGOS version of the LRPT analyzer from robonuka.ru: ftp://meteor2soft:[email protected]/AMIGOS/AMIGOS2.zip.
(AFAIK, only the AMIGOS version is able to decode the data from a socket, which is required for real-time decoding).
The program is to be run under a 32-bit version of Wine.
When the satellite is overhead, open and run the flowgraph (attached) in gnuradio-companion and leave it running. You might need to adjust the gain.
Then, run the LRPToffLineDecoder.exe executable from the extracted archive.
It should display a constantly-updating constellation diagram. When the data is decoded, the channel images will start to appear in each section of the window.That’s it, when the image is decoded, one can save it and close the windows of gnuradio-companion and the decoder.
Notes: when running the flowgraph, no other processes (rtl_sdr, rtl_power, gqrx, …) should use the SDR device.
The modified GRC file is available here.
Enrique is working on a project which would record FM audio as MP3 files. To do this he uses rtl_fm with several RTL-SDR dongles. However, a major roadblock was that he found that adding five or more dongles to his server resulted in all dongles with a USB index over 3 producing the error “Failed to submit transfer 4!”.
After trying to work around the problem with Docker and VMs and ultimately failing he decided to look into other solutions. He found that rtl_test had an option to force synced output, and with this option enabled he was able to use more than four dongles. So he ended up implementing that synchronization code into rtl_fm.
With that code implemented he is now able to run up to 15 dongles on a single server. A higher amount might still be possible, but Enrique did not have that many dongles to test.
If you’ve been experiencing this problem Enrique has uploaded a patched version of rtl_fm at https://github.com/niofis/rtl-sdr.
Update: On Keenerds branch he’s rejected a merge of this patch citing the following:
Synchronous mode doesn’t work. Rtl_fm used to use synchronous mode. It produced constant minor glitches that made data decoding impossible. Don’t use it.
The whole “many simultaneous dongles” problem is a well-known issue related to LibUSB. All you need to do is reduce the DEFAULT_BUF_NUMBER in librtlsdr.c and recompile.
UPDATE: Unfortunately we have been informed that the code base of this software was illegally decompiled and reused in an almost unchanged way from an already available closed source decoder. This means the program itself is illegal and totally unethical.
Please respect the original developers hard work and do not download this software.
A new STD-C Inmarsat decoder called —-Hz has recently been released. The decoder is Windows based and simply listens to the demodulated Inmarsat STD-C audio from a program such as SDR#. This means that it is compatible with the RTL-SDR, and any other SDR that can receive Inmarsat.
We gave the software a brief test and it ran very well, and managed to decode several SafeteNET messages without issue, maintaining a good lock most of the time. The author writes that he plans to improve on the software in the future by creating a web service based version of the software.
Currently there are two other Inmarsat decoders available. One is called InmarsatDecoder and the other is the Tekmanoid decoder. The InmarsatDecoder is generally regarded as the best, but the Tekmanoid decoder was recently updated for improved performance. The new software appears to be about the same as the Tekmanoid decoder.
Inmarsat STD-C messages are broadcast from geostationary satellites in the L-band at around 1.5 Ghz. They send mostly marine based messages such as the following quoted from the ——Hz website:
- Safety: high seas, tropical storm warnings, ice accretion…
- Shipping activity: moving oil rigs, submarine cable deployment and repairs…
- Distress reports: MOB, ships lost at sea, migrant ship reports…
- Military exercises (firing practice, no fly zones…)
- Pirate at sea reports…
If you are interested in learning how to decode STD-C we also have a tutorial available here.
Over on GitHub programmer ‘znuh’ has uploaded a new RTL-SDR compatible GNURadio based tool for DECT decoding. DECT is an acronym for ‘Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications’, and is the wireless standard used by modern digital cordless phones. In most countries DECT communications take place at 1880 – 1900 MHz, and in the USA at 1920 – 1930 MHz. So in order to receive these frequencies you’ll need an RTL-SDR with an E4000 chip, or some other compatible SDR that can tune this high.
It appears that the decoder is not actually able to decode audio (at least not yet or without extra work perhaps), but it can at least output the DECT packets to Wireshark for analysis. This may be of interest to those wanting to learn more about the DECT protocol.
Update: Over on the Reddit thread for this software the original poster ‘sanjuro’ has given a hint on how to (in theory) decode the audio, he writes:
In theory you only need to dump B-field data into a file and then play with g726 codec. See documentation from previous de-DECTed project http://wiki.securityweekly.com/wiki/index.php/Episode158
Over on his blog ‘Radio for Everyone’ Akos has shared results submitted to him by FlightAware forum user ‘Nitr0’ which compares several ADS-B antennas that cost under $50 USD. The antenna that we most recommend for ADS-B is the FlightAware antenna, but for European buyers there are also many lower cost alternatives available on eBay, most of which are made by fellow radio hobbyists or hams. The tests use the six antennas listed below, comparing each one against the ‘reference’ FlightAware antenna.
In summary the tests seem to show that nothing beats the FlightAware antenna, with the closest in performance being the Bulgarian made antenna. We should mention however, without knowing the real radiation patterns, SWR and various other factors it is hard to say which one will work best for everyone. Different locations/obstacles/mountings could mean that antennas with different designs and therefore radiation patterns work better than others. But it seems that the FlightAware antenna is the top performer in the common scenario of being able to mount the antenna on a roof with a good view of the horizon.
