October 19, 2016

A Multi-Channel Coherent RTL-SDR Product: For Passive Radar, Direction Finding and More

Coherent-receiver.com is a company which is a customer of our RTL-SDR V3 dongle and they have been working on creating a multi-channel coherent receiver product based on the RTL-SDR. An RTL-SDR multi-channel coherent receiver is at its most basic, two or more RTL-SDR dongles (multi-channel) that are running from a single clock source (coherent). A multi-channel coherent receiver allows signal samples from two different antennas to be synchronized against time, allowing for all sorts of interesting applications such as passive radar and direction finding.

The team at coherent-receiver.com have used the new expansion headers on our V3 dongles to create their product. In their receivers they attach a control board which has a buffered 0.1 PPM TCXO (buffered so it can power multiple RTL-SDR’s). They also added an 8-bit register and I2C connection capabilities which allows for control of future add-on boards. The I2C capability is useful because it means that several RTL-SDR dongles can be controlled and tuned from the same control signal. More information on the registers and build of the receiver control board can be seen on their technical support page.

A ten channel RTL-SDR coherent receiver.

One example application of a multi-channel coherent receiver is passive radar. Coincidentally, we’ve just seen the release of new GUI based Passive Radar software by Dr. Daniel Michał Kamiński in yesterdays post. Passive radar works by listening for strong signals bouncing off airborne objects such as planes and meteors, and performing calculations on the signals being received by two antennas connected to the multi-channel coherent receiver.

A second example is direction finding experiments. By setting up several antennas connected to a multichannel coherent receiver calculations can be made to determine the direction a signal is coming from. An interesting example of direction finding with three coherent RTL-SDRs can be seen in this previous post. A third example application is pulsar detection which we have seen in this previous post.

Coherent-receiver.com sent us a prototype unit that they made with four of our V3 dongles. In testing we found that the unit is solidly built and works perfectly. We tested it together with Dr. Kamiński’s passive radar software and it ran well, however we do not have the correct directional antennas required to actually use it as a passive radar yet. In the future we hope to obtain these antennas and test the coherent receiver and the software further.

Currently they do not have pricing for these models as it seems that they are first trying to gauge interest in the product. If you are interested in purchasing or learning more they suggest sending an email to [email protected]. It seems that they are also working on additional RTL-SDR ecosystem products such as filters, downconverters, antennas and LNAs.

We hope that the release of this product and Dr. Kamiński’s software will give a boost to the development of coherent multi-channel receivers as we have not seen much development in this area until recently.

SDRDue running on the coherent-receiver.com unit.

Tweet21

Vote

21 Shares

October 17, 2016

SDRDue: New Software for Passive Radar with Two Coherent RTL-SDR Dongles

UPDATE March 2019: Daniel's site has gone down, but the downloads are still available here.

Dr. Daniel Michał Kamiński, author of two SDR# plugins has recently released a new passive radar program for the RTL-SDR called "SDRDue". Passive radar is a technique that makes use of signals from strong distant transmitters. The idea is that these signals can be reflected off the fuselage of aircraft or other flying objects, and the reflection can be observed by a passive radar receiver. By correlating data from two receivers and two antennas, more accurate positional data can be obtained.

For passive radar to work properly the receivers should be coherent, meaning that they run from the same clock and have synchronized samples. The RTL-SDR can be made coherent by connecting two dongles to a single clock source.

The software runs on multi-threaded C# code, and uses Microsoft XNA 4.0 for the graphical operations. It also supports GPU parallel calculations if you have OpenCL and an AMD graphics card.

Please note that we attempted to run the program, but it would not even open on our PC. We've contacted the author to ask if there is any known problems. If anyone gets it running please report back in the comments section of this post. EDIT: Daniel has updated the software and it appears to be functioning normally now. You will need to install it into a SDR# folder, and run SDR# first with both dongles before the software will recognise the dongles in SDRDue. We also had better luck with using the rtlsdr.dll_ file, rather than the default rtlsdr.dll file. Just delete the original rtlsdr.dll and rename rtlsdr.dll_ to rtlsdr.dll.

For more information on passive radar we recommend looking at this previous post where we showed the work of Juha Vierinen who used RTL-SDR's to build a passive radar.

Tweet27

Vote

27 Shares

October 13, 2016

Outernet Weather Updates Now Coming Down

A few days ago we reported that the Outernet L-band satellite service had just upgraded their software to make it available for receiving APRS and weather updates. Back then it wasn’t clear what the weather updates would entail. Today weather updates starting being transmitted. They are using NOAA data and displaying it on a live weather app (which can also be viewed online here).

The app can be used to view weather data such as wind vectors, temperatures, relative humidity, total precipitable water, total cloud water, mean sea level pressure and ocean currents. Outernet writes that the global weather data will be updated via their satellite system once per day, and that each update also provides 24h, 48h and 72h predictions.

We also see that grib files for mariners are now coming in as well as several Wikipedia articles and regular APRS broadcasts from the ISS.

It looks like the Outernet service is becoming more and more useful over time. If you are interested in receiving Outernet with an RTL-SDR see our tutorial post here.

Tweet16

Vote

16 Shares

October 13, 2016

New SDR# Plugin: Radio-Sky Spectrograph Data Stream

Edit: If you downloaded an older version of the plugin please note that it has now been updated. The update fixes some stability issues which would previously hang SDR#. The updated .dll file can be downloaded directly from https://goo.gl/0dPzOL.

Radio-Sky Spectrograph is a radio astronomy software program which is often used together with the RTL-SDR or other similar SDRs. It is best explained by the author:

Radio-Sky Spectrograph displays a waterfall spectrum. It is not so different from other programs that produce these displays except that it saves the spectra at a manageable data rate and provides channel widths that are consistent with many natural radio signal bandwidths. For terrestrial , solar flare, Jupiter decametric, or emission/absorption observations you might want to use RSS.

Usually to interface an RTL-SDR with Radio-Sky Specrtograph a program called RTL-Bridge is used. However, now SDR# plugin programmer Alan Duffy has created a new plugin that allows SDR# to interface with Radio-Sky Spectrograph via a network stream. This allows it to work with any SDR that is supported by SDR# plugins. Alan Duffy writes:

I wrote the plugin after becoming interested in amateur radio astronomy. The plugin allows you to use any of the software defined radios supported by SDR# to feed the Radio-Sky Spectrograph program with wide-band data. The plugin shows the frequency, bandwidth, and FFT resolution and has a user selected "Number of Channels" that are sent to the spectrograph program with an allowable range of 100 to 500. This number can only be edited when the data stream is not enabled. Also if certain key parameters change, such as the frequency or decimation, the network stream will stop as the spectrograph would no longer be capturing the same data. If this happens, simply click the start button on client side software (i.e. Radio-Sky Spectrograph). As long as the Enable box is checked on the server side, the plugin will listen for a connection and start transmitting data after RSS makes a new request for data.

We note that the software might also be useful for simply capturing a long term waterfall for finding active frequencies or looking for meteor scatter or aircraft scatter echoes.

Vote

October 12, 2016

KiwiSDR Soon to Accept General Orders

Back in April 2016 the KiwiSDR was successfully funded on Kickstarter. Since then almost all the rewards have been mailed out and the number of worldwide receivers available on sdr.hu has increased. KiwiSDR is an SDR cape (add on) for the BeagleBone Black/Green embedded computer which covers 0 – 30 MHz with 30 MHz bandwidth. It’s main purpose is to be used as a web based remote receiver which can be publicly accessed by many users.

Over on the Kickstarter updates page we see news that Seeed Studio is taking over the production and distribution of the KiwiSDR, and soon you’ll be able to order the KiwiSDR cape directly from their online Bazaar. Seeed studio is the same company that produces several other capes for the BeagleBone and they also produce the BeagleBone Green which is needed to run the KiwiSDR. They write:

We are very pleased to announce an agreement for Seeed Studio to take over production and distribution of the KiwiSDR going forward. What does this mean? Until now Seeed only had a contract with us to produce the Kickstarter rewards and pre-orders. Now Seeed will add the KiwiSDR to their family of BeagleBone capes they manufacture and distribute. Very soon you’ll be able to order the KiwiSDR directly from Seeed’s online Bazaar, pay directly with a credit card or Paypal and use their shipping system.

For us, and you as Kiwi owners, this is a very positive development. It means soon we’ll be able to devote the majority of our time to software development and providing you support. And as you probably know there is a large list of bugs, feature requests, extensions, distributed experiments and educational material we’d like to be working on instead of worrying about shipping and manufacturing issues. Improving the software is the best way to differentiate ourselves in a crowded SDR marketplace.

We would appreciate it if you would continue to purchase from us until our stock is depleted. Seeed has already manufactured a significant number of units alongside our prior build and will be able to meet the demand immediately. We thank everyone at Seeed for their fantastic effort in making KiwiSDR a reality.

Tweet15

Vote

15 Shares

October 12, 2016

Software for creating an Interactive RTL_POWER Visualization

RTL-SDR.com reader Dominic Chen recently wrote in to let us know about a new piece of software he’s created. The software is called d3-waterfall, and is an interactive web based waterfall display. It takes CSV data from the commonly used rtl_power software and produces an interactive labelled waterfall which can be viewed in a web browser. rtl_power is a program that allows RTL-SDRs to produce signal power scans over an arbitrarily wide swath of bandwidth, by quickly hopping between ~2 MHz chunks of live bandwidth.

Dominics software is built using “d3.js” and HTML5. The waterfall axes are automatically labelled, there are multiple color schemes and there is pan/zoom support. The main feature is that it is mouse interactive, so when you mouse over a frequency it shows what the signal is. The default signal frequency data is taken directly from our sister site sigidwiki.com, so it may not be accurate for your particular area. But the labels are editable, so it can be customized.

An example of a previous scan can be seen on Dominic’s website (note that this is a 65mb link so be careful if you are data restricted). The software can be downloaded from its GitHub page.

Vote

October 11, 2016

L-Band Setup with Mini LNA4ALL and Mini Patch Antenna

Over on his YouTube channel Adam 9A4QV has uploaded a new video showing reception of L-band signals with a bias tee powered LNA4ALL and a small patch antenna. The video seems to show a new miniature bias tee powered LNA4ALL device that Adam might be working on. The LNA4ALL is a low noise amplifier that works well with our bias tee capable RTL-SDR dongles.

The patch antenna is made out of a single piece of PCB board which was made by etching out the patch pattern with masking tape. While the patch antenna is not optimal, and tested indoors, Adam is still able to receive some AERO signals.

Later in the video he compares the PCB patch against a GPS patch antenna which gets no reception. He also compares the results when two LNA4ALL’s are used in series. Using two LNA’s improves reception slightly.

L band mini setup

Watch this video on YouTube

Tweet18

Vote

18 Shares

October 11, 2016

Experimenting with Broadcast FM RDS (TMC, RT+) and SCA Audio

A typical broadcast FM station can sometimes contain “hidden” subcarriers embedded within the main signal. The subcarriers contain data or audio services.

An example of a data subcarrier hidden within broadcast FM is the “Traffic Message Channel” (TMC). The TMC contains traffic data, and is used on GPS devices that advertise as having live traffic capabilities. TMC data is encrypted so that it can be sold, but is very easily broken. Another data service is RDS-RT+ data which transmits song information, for radios that can display it.

An example of a voice subcarrier (SCA/ACS) might be niche radio stations, such as ethnic stations, elevator music, music for doctors offices etc. Usually a specialized radio is required to receive a SCA channel. In a previous post we showed how a user was able to receive SCA on Windows.

Over on his blog Gough Lui has been investigating the broadcast FM subcarriers in his home town of Sydney, Australia. In his post he looks at TMC, RDS-RT+ and SCA subcarriers and explains a bit about what they are and how they work. He also goes on to receive and decode the subcarriers with an RTL-SDR, gr-rds and GNU Radio. While Gough doesn’t bother to decrypt the TMC service, he can still see when an event occurs and what the even was. Without decryption he just doesn’t know where the location on the event is. For SCA he wrote a GNU Radio program to extract the audio subcarrier and was able to decode audio from a local Indian station for migrants.

Tweet10

Vote

10 Shares