YouTube user ranickel and creator of the RANVerter HF upconverter for software defined radios has posted a video showing how to use an RTL-SDR dongle and RANVerter to create a panadapter for an old and cheap Heathkit HR-10 “beginners receiver” ham radio.
He connects the mixer stage of the HR-10 via a capacitor to his RANVerter which then connects to a RTL-SDR dongle.
HackRF is now for sale on Kickstarter, and it has already reached it’s $80,000 USD goal in less than half a day. If you didn’t already know, HackRF is an open source Software Defined Radio that can receive and transmit between 30 MHz and 6 GHz. HackRF has a 20 MHz bandwidth which when compared to the RTL-SDRs 3.2 MHz maximum is a lot.
There have already been 500 HackRF beta units sent out so the hardware should be fairly stable by now.
The basic package which includes a fully assembled HackRF board and enclosure is selling for $275. For $315 you can get a HackRF, enclosure and a Ham-It-Up upconverter as well, which is commonly also used with the RTL-SDR and will allow you to receive the HF bands between 0 – 30 MHz.
If you are interested in some videos, here is a video showing the HackRF transmitting wideband FM using GNURadio.
Here, showing 20 MHz of the GSM band
Here, 20 MHz of the broadcast FM band
On YouTube, Stephen Ong has posted a video (and written a short post on his blog) of a portable home made spectrum analyzer he made using the RTL-SDR, a Beaglebone Black and an LCD touchscreen. The Beaglebone Black is a small Linux capable PC that fits in a hand, similar to the Raspberry Pi but with slightly more processing power.
Earlier in the year we posted about another Beaglebone based spectrum analyzer, but this new one by Stephen seems to be much improved with touchscreen capabilities and an improved user interface.
Mike Stirling has just released a still in-development version of his Linux based WebRadio software, which supports the RTL-SDR. WebRadio allows someone to connect to a remote RTL-SDR device via a web interface over the internet, much like WebSDR.
There is an installation guide here.
I was able to compile, install and run the software, but there were a few issues that required resolving.
YouTube user Drvarnick has posted a good video tutorial on getting AIS decoding set up with the RTL-SDR using the free OpenCPN, AISMon, SDRSharp and VBCable Windows software programs.
We also have an AIS decoding tutorial blog post posted earlier in the year that shows similar steps at this link.
Update: KN0CKs products are now available at http://www.kn0ck.com/HF_SDR/.
The fourth revision of the miniature HF upconverter for the RTL-SDR by KN0CK is up for sale, now that revision three has just sold out. Revision four has a 120 MHz oscillator, and is capable of receiving the 6m band.
Check out the release post over at KF7LZE’s blog, and the product sales page at the Easy-Kits store.
Over on travisgoodspeed.blogspot.com, Travis shows us an interesting project where he set up a satellite dish that automatically tracks and receives moving satellites, such as those in low earth orbit. Travis uses an old satellite dish salvaged from a maritime vessel as the receiving dish, a RTL-SDR for receiving the signal, and a BeagleBone for motor control and running rtl_tcp. The dish motors use satellite positional data from celestrak.com to automatically track a desired currently visible moving satellite.
Reddit user bistromat has recently updated the GNU Radio based Mode S ADS-B decoder gr-air-modes. He has added Google maps view, a legend and zoom support to the azimuth map view, and has restructured the underlying code. The new gr-air-modes requires the latest GNU Radio 3.7 version.
Check out the original post here (with cute puppy included), and clone the latest version via github from the following link.
https://github.com/bistromath/gr-air-modes
