Portable Shortwave Spectrum Capture with an Airspy + Spyverter and Tablet

Over on his blog London Shortwave writes how difficult it can be trying to listen to shortwave radio stations when you’re indoors and in a big city filled with RF noise. His solution is a portable lightweight shortwave travel kit that he can take to the park. The kit that he recommends using includes an Airspy SDR with SpyVerter upconverter, a Toshiba Encore 8″ Tablet and an OTG USB adapter. His antenna is a portable dipole made from two pieces of 6m copper wire connected to a balun, then connected to the SDR with 3m of coax. The whole kit easily fits into a small metal brief case.

For the software London Shortwave uses SDR# and he enjoys capturing large chunks of the HF spectrum for replay later using the base band recorder and file player plugins for SDR#. In his post he also shows how he runs the Airspy in debug mode to restrict it to 6 MHz which is the maximum bandwidth that his tablet’s CPU can handle.

His post shows various example videos of his setup receiving some nice shortwave signals.