February 16, 2015

Getting started with amateur satellite reception and the RTL-SDR

Over on the hamspirit.de blog the author Jan has uploaded a post introducing the hobby of amateur satellite reception with the RTL-SDR (in German, use Google Translate). Amateur radio satellites may transmit signals like CW (morse code), voice, APRS and telemetry.

In the article Jan discusses the antennas required to receive satellites, the satellite tracking software gpredict and he introduces some amateur radio satellites that have strong transmitters and are thus easy to receive. He also shows waterfall screenshots of several amateur radio satellites that he has received.

July 18, 2014

Assembling the Chinese RTL-SDR Direct Sampling Kit

A few months ago we posted about a Chinese individual (BA5SBA) who had begun selling RTL-SDR dongle kits for receiving HF frequencies. Back then it wasn’t entirely clear what these kits were or where they came from. Now over on Reddit, poster SidJenkins has bought one of these kits and assembled it. He has uploaded images of the construction which can be found here and the Reddit discussion can be found here. The kit is essentially an RTL-SDR extension PCB board that aids in building a direct sampling RTL-SDR with good performance by including filters and impedance matching.

SidJenkins notes that the kit came with no instructions, so he used this thread in Chinese (use Google translate) to help put the kit together.