YouTube user Eric William has put together a video showing off his RTL-SDR “Go Bag” kit. The kit contains all the items he needs to use an RTL-SDR wherever he goes. In the video and video description he talks about all the adapters he uses, and also all the miscellaneous items such as upconverters and portable antennas that he carries in the kit.
YouTube user HamradioSat has put up a video tutorial showing how to connect SDR# and Orbitron together. By interfacing the two, Orbitron can then be used to automatically tune to the doppler corrected frequency of a satellite passing overhead in SDR#. Orbitron is a free satellite tracking software program.
This can be useful for simplifying the tracking of NOAA weather satellites and downloading their live images.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7Ut-HvnRb8&feature=youtube_gdata
Finding the correct direction to point a satellite for TV reception can be difficult without the right equipment. YouTube user MegaOscarVideos shows us in the video below how he uses an RTL-SDR to accurately aim his satellite for TV reception.
He uses a TV satellite dish with an LNB connected to a bias-T circuit as the receiver, which is then connected to the RTL-SDR. As the satellite is moved he looks for the direction at which the signal level in SDR# increases the most.
GR-RDS is a GNU Radio program which can be used for the decoding of FM RDS data with the RTL-SDR. It has recently been updated to support GNU Radio 3.7.
RDS is an acronym for Radio Data System, which is used in FM radio transmissions to embed information such as radio station and programme/song information. Some conventional FM radios display this information on an LCD screen.
One the authors of GR-RDS has also recently posted a video on YouTube showing it in action with an RTL-SDR source block.
YouTube user Tim Havens has uploaded two videos showing his meteor detection results with an RTL-SDR dongle. Tim uses a stock R820T dongle, and a 6 element yagi antenna with LNA.
For the software he uses Spectrum Lab and SDRSharp.
Update: Tehrasha from the comments section has found a page by Tim Havens showing a little information on his meteor detection setup.
YouTube user mutezone has uploaded a video showing a comparison between several portable shortwave radios and the RTL-SDR. His results show that the portable radios performed better than the RTL-SDR dongle at shortwave-dxing, however we are unsure of what method he used (direct sampling or upconverter) to get access to the shortwave bands on the RTL-SDR.
Update: KN0CKs products are now available at http://www.kn0ck.com/HF_SDR/.
Previously on this blog we’ve seen KN0CK release his custom modified RTL-SDR tuners which have built in upconverters for accessing the HF bands. Revision 5 of the KN0CK receiver is now almost ready for sale, and will be sold over at KF7LZE’s webstore Easy-Kits.com.
Revision 5 promises to be lower priced as it will run using the direct sampling mod instead of using an upconverter which would require more components. It will also use a Mini-Circuits MAR 8 wideband amplifier to improve weak signal performance.
Amateur radio hobbyist LA3ZA shows an image on his blog showing how busy the 70cm ISM band can be in his area in Norway. He uses a roof mounted 1.7 m long vertical antenna with 7.2dBi gain in the 70 cm band. Each signal burst may come from a remote car key, weather monitor, electricity monitor, or other telemetry device. Some of these signals may be decodeable with rtl_433.
