Over on YouTube Sarah is back this week with a new video on her channel SignalsEverywhere. In this video she shows how to decode HF WEFAX (weather fax) images using an Airspy HF+ Discovery software defined radio with a YouLoop antenna. HF weather faxes are daily weather chart images transmitted as an analogue signal over the HF bands by coastal stations. They are mostly used by ships at sea.
First Sarah shows where to find a lists of WEFAX frequencies and schedules for her area, and then goes on to demonstrate a WEFAX signal being received and decoded using SDR#, VB-Audio Cable and the FLDIGI decoder.
Decoding HF WEFAX Weather Fax with SDR Software Defined Radio | Airspy HF Discovery
The 11th New England Workshop on Software Defined Radio (NEWSDR 2021) will again be held online this year due to the ongoing pandemic. It is due to begin on Friday, 20 August 2021, 9:00 AM (EDT) – 5:30 PM (EDT). Registration is completely free.
The 11th iteration of NEWSDR will be held in a fully virtual format on August 20, 2021. The event will include a series of talks from invited speakers and our industry sponsors (Analog Devices, Ettus/NI, Lynk, MathWorks, and MediaTek) along with interactive breakout sessions, poster sessions, and sponsor/exhibitor booths within the Gather virtual meeting platform.
Registration is completely free and we are also accepting submissions for poster presentations and elevator pitches!
A livestream link has already been set up on YouTube for the 20th, so if interested you can set a reminder using the YouTube reminder feature.
All presentations from the 2020 NEWSDR virtual conference can be viewed on the YouTube video below.
NEWSDR 2020 :: 10th New England Workshop on Software-Defined Radio
Thankyou to M.Khanfar for submitting news about his latest project which involves running an RTL-SDR dongle on a QNAP NAS (network attached storage). Running a dongle on a NAS machine might be useful if you need to record large amounts of IQ data, or need fast network speeds. Khanfar writes:
In this video , I will show you step by step how to make QNAP NAS Recognize and Running SDR Dongle and connected directly via USB and then launching rtl-sdr tools by installing dependencies tool to run like rtl_tcp.
The tools we need to install its calling QPKG. QNap Nas has it's own operating system called QTS, and NAS it mean ( Network Attached storage ) and I'm successfully implementing dependencies and make QNAP Recognize my SDR Dongle Stand alone.
The QPKG it's like. exe in windows, but its special extensions for qnap operating system QTS .
The two qpkg (software) we will install them from third party delevopper for qnap , not from official qnap store, and I will install them inside my QNAP and you will see step by step how it's easy to turn your QNAP NAS to SDR Server without any pc needed !
And the advantage is the qnap is stand alone, and it has a high speed gigabit LAN speed, and it have SSL certificate that I buy it from qnap store for secure connection from outside and it has like fix up adrress it's called qnap Id.
So I can easy running my sdr# from my work directly TCP to my SDR dongle ! using qnap Id with plus port number for TCP like 1234.
If you have +3mbps internet speed for uploading in your home, you can easy access and making connection to rtl_tcp from different country, and secured with ssl and qnap I'd ! I will post in future video for WAN Access secure and fast to rtl_tcp from outside.
The two QPKG we need :
1-Entware-3x-std: its install many dependencies packages to use in terminal like OPKG tool that we need it to install rtl-sdr package! . 2-Gotty : its terminal emulator I use it inside qnap to install commands. follow my video for understanding!
My qnap model in this video: QNAP TS-228
The command I use after install all dependencies: opkg install git rtl-sdr
SDR++ is an open source, cross platform, C++ based GUI general receiver program for various SDRs including the RTL-SDR. Since it's alpha release in mid 2020, it has undergone huge amount of development, and is quickly becoming the main program of choice for many users due to it's efficiency, cross platform and multi-SDR hardware support and increasing feature set. And with an easy GUI very similar to that of SDR#, it's easy for most users to learn.
Recently version 1.0.0 of the SDR++ software has recently been released. This is the first non-beta stable version, so represents a major milestone in development. Over on Reddit programmer u/xX_WhatsTheGeek_Xx summarizes the latest developments.
After over a year of work, I'm proud to released version 1.0.0 of SDR++!
For those who don't know, SDR++ is a crossplatform (Windows, Linux, MacOS, BSD) and open-source (https://github.com/AlexandreRouma/SDRPlusPlus/releases) general purpose receiver software meant to be simple and easy to use. It has advances features like multi-vfo and uses a fully custom DSP making it very efficient.
Here are the following additions compared to the last version:
Support for the SpyServer protocol
Support for all SDRplay devices
Support for all BladeRF devices
Support for all LimeSDR devices
Optional IQ correction
Optional Decimation
Broadcast FM Stereo
Frequency manager to create lists of frequency and optionally display them directly on the FFT/Waterfall
Network sink to stream the audio output via TCP or UDP
Options to set the FFT framerate, FFT size and FFT window.
Theming with Dark and Light themes supplied by default
RigCTL server module to control SDR++ from, for example, gpredict.
A bunch of keyboard shortcuts (see wiki on the github page)
SNR meter
More info when hovering a VFO
Colored VFOs to easily identify which is which at a glance
Meteor M2 demodulator compatible with LRPTOfflineDecoder and Satdump
Ability to resize VFOs by directly dragging the sides on the FFT and waterfall
Module manager to easily add or remove any module on the fly without having to restart or edit the config manually
File dialogs to select directories in the recorder or files in the file source (instead of having to type in the path)
Ability to disable modules that support it (Radio and Meteor M2 demodulator) with one click (to save CPU power or just if they're not needed)
Lots of performance improvements
Ludicrous amounts of bugfix :)
I'd like to thank the many contributors, patrons and companies (SDRplay, Airspy, Nuand, LimeMicro) who helped make this project possible!
If you have any issue with the software, please open a github issue or contact me directly on the SDR++ discord (see readme on github)
I hope this software comes in useful to at least some of you ;)
We also wanted to highlight the fact that SDR++ runs smoothly with about 50% CPU usage on a Raspberry Pi 4 with an RTL-SDR.
Also according to @cemaxecuter who created DragonOS, if rtaudio is installed on Linux , then an easy to use virtual audio sink becomes usable from SDR++, allowing audio to be easily passed to other programs such as WSJT-X just like on Windows.
A ready to use zip file for Windows is available on the GitHub Releases page, as well as amd64 .deb and .pkg install files for Ubuntu, Debian and MacOS systems. For other systems the compilation instructions are available on the readme or Git main page.
The RadioBerry is a HF transceiver board designed to be used as an add on 'hat' for the Raspberry Pi. It uses the same AD9866 chip as the Hermes Lite 2 SDR which gives it a 12-bit ADC with one RX and one TX channel, a maximum bandwidth of up to 384 kHz, and an operating frequency range of 0 to 30 MHz.
In the video TechMinds shows how to connect and setup the Radioberry software on the Pi and how to stream from the Pi to SDR-Console V3 on a PC. He goes on to demonstrate the Radioberry receiving HF signals, noting that the performance is good, although he uses an Ethernet connection and Pi 4 for best performance.
TechMinds notes that he will test the transmit functionality in a future video, once he receives a preamp designed to be used with the Radioberry.
Over on YouTube the BSides Halifax channel has uploaded a recent talk given by Security Engineer Grant Colgan titled "Hacking RF Breaking what we can't see". In the talk Grant first shows the various bits of wireless devices that he tests, as well as the receiver equipment that he uses which includes a HackRF and RTL-SDR dongles. He goes on to show various live demos.
An often overlooked aspect of security is what happens when information is moving magically from one device to another with no wires. We know this as (usually) Wifi or Bluetooth and any attacks are usually based on these technologies. However when you widen the scope to RF wireless communication, A lot more tools become available. In this talk I will be talking about the attack and doing live demos.
Back in September 2020 we posted about the release of an X-Band decoder for the Elektro-L2 and Elektro-L3 Russian geostationary satellites. These satellites are receivable from Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, South America and Australia. Unlike the HRIT and LRIT L-band transmissions from other geosynchronous satellites like GOES and GK-2A, the X-band Elektro signal is quite difficult to receive, requiring a large dish and more expensive hardware.
However we've recently seen exciting news on Twitter that a new L-band LRIT transmission has been activated on Elektro-L3. Like the Korean GK-2A satellite, this L-band LRIT transmission at 1691 MHz should be much easier to receive requiring only a WiFi dish, SAWBird GOES LNA and an RTL-SDR. We haven't yet confirmed if like GK-2A, the smaller 600 x 400 mm WiFi dish is sufficient, or if Elektro requires the larger 600 x 1000 mm dish size. (See our GOES satellite and GK-2A tutorial for information about the hardware being discussed in this paragraph.)
We note that the Elektro-L3 signal appears to be in testing, and the transmission could be turned on and off, or even turned off permanently. The transmission schedule is also not yet clear although in this recent tweet @HRPTEgor has mapped out some current transmission times for Eletro-L3.
It is hoped that LRIT will also eventually be activated on Elektro-L2, and perhaps even HRIT will be activated too. It is also exciting that more Elektro-L satellites are planned to be launched from 2022 onwards and we expect those to have hopefully LRIT and HRIT transmissions as well. To add further excitement, it is hoped that the L3 LRIT activation means that a LRIT or HRIT signal will be activated on the high elliptical orbit (HEO) northern hemisphere Arctic monitoring ARKTIKA-M1 satellite launched in Feb 2021, as this satellite is derived from the Elektro-L design.
The LRIT activation of Elektro-L3 hopefully means that Europeans should finally have access to a geostationary weather satellite that can be easily received with modest low cost hardware. The current coverage map from Orbitron of the two Elektro satellites is shown below (note that Elektro-L2 LRIT does not appear to have been activated yet).
Elektro-L2 and Elektro-L3 Coverage (Currently only Elektro-L3 LRIT transmissions have been discovered)
Over on Twitter @aang254 has noted that he has already updated his satdump software, adding support for Elektro LRIT decoding, and adding support for all of the available channels and for color. Satdump is available as a binary for Windows, and on Linux can be built from source. Experimentally, Satdump can also be built and run on Android.
The Tweet from @aang254 provides a nice sample image of what can be received.
I turns out ELEKTRO-L LRIT contains all 3 Visible channels and apparently 2 IR channels.
In the previous episode Rob from the Frugal Radio YouTube channel showed us how to decode HF ACARS using PC-HFDL and an HF capable SDR such as the Airspy HF+. In that episode he mentioned that it is possible to decode HF ACARS using a WebSDR as well.
In this weeks episode, Rob shows us how to do just that, making use of WebSDR receivers and the PC-HFDL software. Like the previous episode we see how to plot the aircraft HF ACARS position data on Google Earth and how to read and interpret some example messages received.
