RTL-SDR.com SDR Dongle Giveaway!
We are giving away 20 of our new units with the metal case!
Competition has now ended! Thanks to all who entered! Winners to be announced by Monday.
The RTL-SDR and SDR community spans multiple disciplines and there are many wildly different projects being worked on by SDR enthusiasts as regular readers of our blog may already know. We want to thank all our readers with a competition and at the same time get everyone to share what projects you are all working on.
There are four chances to enter the contest and you may enter in all four competitions. On each method we will give away 5 RTL-SDR blog dongle + antenna units. Competition ends in one week on the 22nd of January at 23:59 hrs (midnight) PST time. Winners will be notified in the following 1-2 days and we will do a post about it too.
Competition Entry 1) Like us on Facebook and make a comment on the the contest post mentioning what SDR related projects you are currently working on, or plan to work on in the future.
Competition Entry 2) Follow us on Twitter and tweet at us @rtlsdrblog mentioning the SDR related projects you are currently working on, or plan to work on in the future.
Competition Entry 3) Make a comment on this very blog post mentioning what SDR related projects you are currently working on, or plan to work on in the future. (Please include a contact email address in the email field – it will only be visible to us and we won’t use it for anything else, promise!)
Competition Entry 4) Sign up to our email mailing list here or on the right hand navigation menu. (we send out a once weekly digest of the weeks posts).
We want to hear about any and all projects, no matter how simple you might think they are! At the end of the competition we will randomly select five winners from each competition entry method and contact them. Please remember to check your Facebook/Twitter/email accounts if your name comes up when the winners are announced.
Rules: Only one entry per person per method! E.g. you can enter once on Facebook, once on Twitter, once by commenting here, and once by signing up to our mailing list. No duplicate accounts are allowed. You must be legally be allowed to receive and own an RTL-SDR dongle to enter.
I will make an HF upconverter for rtl-sdr and a band stop filter for fm radio band.
Working in the development of a plugin for SDR# to decode digital modes. Finishing my upconverter setup for HF. And waiting for the downconverter from Adam.
I volunteer at the ham shack in the South Florida Science Center where we have an operating ham radio station. I provide demonstrations of the RTL-SDR describing it as the crystal radio of the 21st century. Linked with the signal wiki I demonstrate the sights and sounds of communications. Eventually we would like to put together an RTL-SDR kit that would be available in the science center gift shop.
We are also experimenting to use the RTS-SDR in combination with a Raspberry Pi 2 as a low power transceiver.
I feed low fly wales uk, flight radar24 and flightaware currently from two different locations in the uk with two Raspberry pi units for ADS-B
Most of our 120 stations in the uk use the RTL dongles and would more than likely swap to your dongle if they are more sensitive.
Feel free to contact me and i will gladly test your new dongles and run onsite comparison tests againtst the original RTL dongles.
Look forward to hearing from you with view to supplying our station members.
Will use RTL-SDR dongle to learn more about wide band signals, to monitor digital communications and ham radio bands.
Working on setting up an APRS IGate using an rtl-sdr dongle.
Wanting to work on receiving imarsat
Working on using an RTL-SDR and piFM (on a PiZero) to re-transmit shortwave broadcasts onto FM so I can listen anywhere in the house.
Research on mobile localization with LTE, by using RTL-SDR dongles to receive LTE signals for opportunistic time of arrival (ToA) positioning.
Would you please describe a bit about this project, I went through your PhD thesis and wondered, how do you overcome the bandwidth and synchronization issues?
I will be thankful hearing from you back.
Cheers,
Salam
I’m glad of your interest for this project. My work is based on the assessment of the positioning capabilities of LTE technology as a complement to GNSS (e.g. GPS, Galileo, GLONASS,… ), mainly in urban areas. The use of RTL-SDR is just a first step towards localization by means of signals of opportunity, accessible to everybody. Regarding to your questions:
– Bandwidth: The low signal bandwidth is a big constraint to achieve a high accuracy, still some advanced processing techniques can be applied. We proposed the use of channel estimation to counteract the effect of multipath, improving the results with respect to more classical technques:
http://spcomnav.uab.es/docs/journals/Peral_JASP_2014.pdf
– Synchronization: The main synchronization problem is between base stations (BSs), since the clock offset between these transmitters is unknown. We propose to calibrate the BSs clock by considering a known initial position:
http://spcomnav.uab.es/docs/conferences/DelPeral_ICL-GNSS_2015.pdf
Despite the RF front-end limitation of RTL-SDR, its use is a nice start for urban localization with signals of opportunity.
I want to learn everything about SDR. This is a great device and great price. I’m using it to listen to digital public safety communications.
Reverse Engineering Radio Frequency of different circuits using RTL-SDR dongle. Also trying to improve a way to use two RTL-SDR in triangulation method in order to locate a specific RF transmitter.
I’m working on several wide spectrum monitoring and also P25 decoding projects. I want a new SDR dongle!!!
Testing various options for UHF data transfer specifically around digital audio for production use.
My SDR Projects
Currently just evaluating various SDR options.
Must be very portable 🙂 and work mainly on HF up to VHF/UHF (2m/70cm amateur bands).
I plan to build a RDS data receiver for FM Radio
I am currently feeding ADS-B data to Flightaware and Planefinder. I want to have another dongle to experiment with other homemade antennas and try out a good number of the projects posted here. Thank you, I check out almost daily.
I regularly listen to HF with a downconverter using a wire antenna in the attic, and also enjoy watching NOAA’s weather and ISS’s SSTV using a QFH antenna. I’d use a second dongle to explore the possibility of doubling the bandwidth. Thanks!
Currently working on an ADS-B antenna which will hopefully pick up more signals than my current antenna. If everything works well I have been thinking about providing that data to flightradar24. Thanks for doing this giveaway.
homemade rtl-sdr related hardware, antennae, automatic noaa/meteor image receiving station, university lab course using rtl-sdr
Currently do a lot of trunk-tracking, but would also like to expand my SDR horizons. Lots of interesting projects out there.
I plan to fly a raspberry PI2 and SDR payload on a drone and record it as a IQ file for later playback.
Besides listening to everything(!), I want to do some Radio Astronomy while also getting my Grandchildren interested in electronics (and/or astronomy).
I plan to fly a raspberry PI 2 and SDR as a drone payload and then record an IQ file for playback after landing.
I use my RTLSDR dongles (I have two) with unitrunker to listen to Austin PD. Also use it as a monitor receiver for ham stuff. Would like to try it with inverting transponder ham satellite passes since I dont have a second VHF SSB transceiver.
I’m currently in high school, just got started with the wonderful world of SDR. First learnt about it through Samy Kamkar in his Youtube video where he sniffs traffic from Microsoft wireless keyboards. Immediately my mind thought of the endless possibilities, paired with my Raspberry Pi I could take it anywhere … Not quite sure where to start at the moment (haven’t got the hardware yet), but I would love to test out the PiTX code to experiment. I would also be interested in decoding signals in everyday life e.g. garage door openers, vehicle keyless entry. I think this would also be a great topic to cover in my Physics extended essay. Love the genius ideas that stem from this cheap dongle, I think they really should bring these sorts of equipment into schools!
In fact, I think I might introduce this to my school’s robotics club, hopefully with a live demo!
Got my first device few month ago. Thanks to wide support avialable across the fourms ,could able setup own environment in LabVIEW quickly .
Using RTL-SDR and LabVIEW to develop receiver for radiosonde app. Two channel receiver is developed using two independent RTL SDR units fed from two different antenna viz monopole and QHA.
Always tinkering. Love adsb and have built a number of antennas to suit. Always playing in the HF bands, and using Adams LNA for HF and a ham it up. Love following trunked channels and p25 with DSD. Alas the local authorities encrypt… Just started playing with Inmarsat antennas and decoding. The rtlsdr has been a major help finding sources of interference when setting up remote HF base stations around Oz. Keep up the awesome work.
I working on a automatic scan-system that monitor for new used frequencies
I wrote rtl_fm_python, and thanks to you all I get a like 200 views a week! I hope to refresh the project this year and incorporate some of the improvements from the community and finish the UI & API for the scanning feature in rtl_fm.
Exciting Projects…
Presently working on several vertical biconical dipole antennas (tuned 300MHz and up,) and planning to make another set tuned to start at longer wavelengths.
Since September, I built a planar disk antenna with 20″ x 20″ squares cut with ordinary scissors from aluminum flashing 20″ x 10′ mounted to 1.25″ diameter PVC, 6 nylon wire ties, 2 screws and 2 wing nuts–all from the same big-box hardware store. Found refurbished Dell Core2 Duo 64-bit Windows 7 systems on eBay for $100 (no keyboard/mouse/monitor) and external eSATA dock and HDDs for each new OS to set up multiple boot Linux/Windows/Android OS for running just about all the software listed on this blog. (Also presently, doing so is slowing down the manufacture of my biconical dipoles–but, that’s okay!)
Working on building some basic antennas out of #10 solid copper wire, blocks of wood, self-tapping screws, contact cement, and some leftover coax cable 🙂
I’ve been attempting to build a series of compact direction finding kits. Antenna switching doesn’t work as well as timing multiple rtls together so far.
Hey. I’m working on the same thing!
The guys at Geontech wrote an interesting paper the year before last.
Scanning P25 trunked radio traffic with unitrunker and multiple RTL-SDR units to cover a span >5MHz. Also dabbling in some 900MHz ISM decoding. Thanks for such a great site, it’s a regular part of my web surfing habits.
I’m working on figuring out how to get the temperature/barometer/moisture data from my store bought weather station so I can log and graph on my computer.
I’m pairing the RTL-SDR with my TS-940SAT and DXLab Commander + SDR# FTW.
Currently looking at decoding my wireless rainwater tank level transmitter… ultimately to integrate with my watering system and enable/disable mains water operation.
Right now it’s something i call FireSDR, Kindle Fire running SDRtouch (& others), and an SDR dongle. hope to add HackRF one + anything else i can get ahold of.
current working on blind decoding various signal in my area that don’t seem to be listed anywhere…
im faily n00b to the world of radio..so learning as I go
email change! 😛
Working on an improved version of the LNA4ALL which comes in a small cheap package. The current LNA4ALL has an optional metal case you can buy for it, but it raises the price from $20 to $80. I knew I could do better. However, mine only works with inline power, so isn’t as versatile, but very compact and cheap. My housing is only $8. Link is to my blog with more details.
Developing an API for HTML5 to support RTL-SDR on Firefox OS.
Meh, actually It’s was a bad idea…