YouTube user tvdxrools . has posted a video showing the performance of the rtl-sdr dongle on receiving sporadic-e. Sporadic-e is a phenomenon which can allow signals of frequency up to 150MHz to travel much further than they could usually. More information about sporadic-e can be found here.
Reddit user rtlsdr_is_fun has updated the SDRSharp Unitrunker trunking plugin so that it works with the latest versions of SDRSharp. See the thread here for more information and a download link. Use this plugin to allow Unitrunker to control SDRSharp, so you can listen to trunked radio conversations. A new tutorial on doing this can be found here.
YouTube user VoiceOfShortWave has posted a video of his rtl-sdr dongle receiving HF LSB ham radio transmissions at 3.7MHz with excellent performance. He used a homemade VEE antenna, and also a Butterworth filter to help reduce FM band interference. His other video shows the effect of his butterworth filter with 60MHz cutoff turning on.
Amateur radio enthusiast and blogger 9A4QV has released a new wideband low noise amplifier (LNA) circuit that would work well with the rtl-sdr. It amplifies from 28MHz to 2500MHz with a 1dB noise figure. Check it out on his page here. At 20 Euros plus 5 Euros worldwide shipping for a fully assembled LNA, it is quite a good deal.
This small gadget can lower and improve you DVB-T SDR stick noise figure and improve the sensitivity. Adding the LNA in front the front end of your receiver can open another dimension in your reception. Receiving HAM radio satellites should not be a problem even with the small setup and portable antennas.
Virtual Audio Cable is an important software tool for the Windows rtl-sdr user. It allows an audio data stream to be piped from a software radio program such as SDRSharp, into a decoding program. Unfortunately Virtual Audio Cable is not free, which is not in the cheap spirit of rtl-sdr, and at $25 it costs more than the dongle itself. There is a trial version, but it periodically plays a watermark voice which can break decoding.
A free (donationware) alternative to Virtual Audio Cable that we recently found is VB-Cable. VB-Cable does exactly the same job as Virtual Audio Cable but for free. By donating any amount to the developer, you can unlock two more virtual audio devices, which is useful if you use multiple rtl-sdr dongles on one machine.
Note, one trick to installing VB-Cable is that I found that I had to run the installer in Administrator Mode on a Windows 7 machine to get it to work.
Digital Radio Monodial (DRM) radio is a type of digital shortwave radio signal that is used by international shortwave radio broadcasters. It provides superior audio quality compared to AM signals by using digital audio encoding. With an upconverter, good antenna, and decoding software the RTL-SDR software defined radio can receive and decode DRM signals. This tutorial is also applicable to other software defined radios that can receive HF with or without an upconverter, such as the HackRF, Airspy, Softrock and Funcube dongle.
YouTube user Superphish shows DRM reception with his Ham-it-up upconverter, and rtl-sdr.
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Update and Note: This plugin appears to be now dead. If you are simply looking for the ADSB# standalone program (not the plugin), it is located in the SDR# install folder from sdrsharp.com.
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A user by the name of darkscout.rm on the SDRSharp Yahoo group has posted version 3 of his ADSB# plugin for SDRSharp. The main purpose of this plugin is that it allows the waterfall to viewed at the same time as decoding, which may help with visually tuning the gain settings, or experimenting with ways to block out out of band interference. He has also added in a 1-bit error recovery by brute force option, which is used in dump1090 and may improve decode performance.
ADSB# is a standalone program to receive ADS-B signals and my ADS-B plugin does the same but from within SDR#. Continue reading
Reddit user BigReid has posted on the Reddit rtl-sdr forums his homemade bandpass filter with a pass range of 1-1.2GHz for improving adsb reception. A bandpass filter blocks any interference from signal frequencies outside of the pass range. This might be useful for adsb if you experience a lot of interference from out of band signals at 1090MHz.
His filter is a hairpin filter, which can easily be etched onto a PCB board. You can find the PCB schematic files linked on the post.
