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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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October 10, 2016

Identifying Transmitters with CTCSS Fingerprinting

Oona Räisänen is a RF hacker and enthusiast who has in the past brought us posts about decoding burger pagers in restaurants, decoding wireless bus signs and FM-RDS with SDR’s like the RTL-SDR. This time she has written an interesting post that shows how she can “fingerprint” radio transmitters by analysing their CTCSS transmissions. CTCSS is short for “Continuous Tone-Coded Squelch System” and is a low frequency tone added on to some transmissions used in handheld radio systems shared by several distinct groups. The CTCSS tone prevents users of a shared system from having to listen to other users talking if they are not part of the same group with the same CTCSS tone frequency. CTCSS provides no means for actually individually identifying a radio.

Oona wanted to see if she could fingerprint and thus identify individual radios by their CTCSS tone by looking at identifying features such as small variances in CTCSS tone power and frequency. The idea is that each radio will have minute differences in the exact tone and power produced by the CTCSS circuitry, due to differences in the crystal oscillators and component tolerances. Oona used an RTL-SDR to record CTCSS data from a conversation on a local handheld radio network. Then by plotting the frequency vs power data on a heatmap graph she was able to find 8 different clusters of points, which potentially identifies 8 individual handheld radios.

Frequency vs power heatmap identifying 8 different radios.

With the individual radios identifiable by their cluster centers, each cluster can be assigned a name. Now each subsequent transmission can be compared to each cluster center, and assigned to the closest matching cluster, thus matching a new unknown transmission with a known radio. This makes it easier for someone listening in with no context to follow a conversation.

Assign names to each radio. — Assign names to each radio/cluster center.

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October 10, 2016

Outernet rxOS Version 3 Released: Automatic Decompression, APRS, NOAA Weather Data, News Updates

Outernet is a new L-band satellite services which aims to be a “library in the sky”. Their satellite signal can be received from almost anywhere in the world, and they aim to constantly transmit data like news, weather updates, books, images/videos and other data files. The service is free and can be received with an RTL-SDR, LNA and patch antenna. We have a full tutorial on receiving their service available here.

The “rxOS” decoder, file management system and web interface GUI has recently been updated to version 3.0. This new version has several new features:

Downloaded files are automatically decompressed after downloading, so they can be viewed directly in the Outernet web interface.
An hourly transmission of APRS data which comes from the repeater on board the international space station. APRS messages can now be relayed across the world via the ISS and Outernet.
This Monday they will begin transmitting NOAA weather data (we are unsure if this entails images or text data yet)
Soon they should begin transmitting news data too.

More details on the update can be found on their forum post. To update the service on a CHIP or Pi 3, download the .pkg file from the links on the forum and choose this file in the Update Firmware section of the Outernet settings menu.

An example of some received APRS messages from the Outernet.

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October 10, 2016

RTLSDR4Everyone: Review of the RTL-SDR V3 + Avoid Ripoff’s Part 4

Akos from the RTLSDR4Everyone blog has just released several new posts. The first three posts review our V3 dongle and the fourth post continues his series on helping users avoid bad deals when it comes to RTL-SDRs.

The first post compares the NooElec SMArt against the V3. Akos finds that the SMArt has a better enclosure for use with the Raspberry Pi, but the V3 has more features and a lower price. The second post is a general review of the V3 dongle, where Akos reviews the features of the V3, shows what comes in the package, shows visually the difference between V2 and V3 PCBs and demonstrates how the V3 has a cleaner waterfall with less spurs. Finally, the third post compares the V2, V3 and SMArt on ADS-B and concludes that there is little to no difference between the three.

The fourth post points out some rip off RTL-SDR related auctions found on eBay. As stated before we believe that the majority of these ripoff sellers are people who are using market arbitrage bots. These bots simply take a listing from Amazon or elsewhere and list it on eBay as their own with a price markup. Then when a buyer purchases from them, they simply order directly from the original seller and get them to ship to the customer. While this is unethical, it seems to be allowed by eBay.

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