Hey beautiful people. Do you know Realtek based usb radio tuners-scanners ? Is anyone else experimenting with those tiny usb sticks ? You can do plenty of stuff with them. Today I managed to pull weather pics right out of the NOAA-15 satellite. This is a sample. Someone wanting to jump aboard, or already a long course frequency sailor ?
still without bothering to go up the roof and put the antenna in proper configuration, managed to get clear pictures of Europe tonight , once again while i was wandering through the VHF range and experimenting with the low noise amplifier. I use mostly Nooelec stuff but also the popular rtl-sdr.com brand chinese tuner that can go as low as 500 KHz with Q-branch sampling. There is a TON of software for the software defined radios: the most popular windows software is SDR# or SDRSharp , or GQRX for Linux. Also; the GNU Radio suite, CubicSDR, Universal Radio Hacker, Unitrunker, SDRTrunk, rtl1090, dsd, dsdplus,virtual radar server, and many more with different purposes. Even MATLAB supports them. It can even work with fucking KISMET. In fact i learned of the existence of rtl-sdr just while gennting my feet wet with it. Oh, RTL-SDR means REALTEK SOFTWARE DEFINED RADIO because they were based on digital tv chips from that very prominent vendor of network related hardware. I discovered that in the UHF band, at about 900 mhz, there are digital tv signals bringing ANALOG AUDIO in wideband fm stereo modulation, along with digital picture signal, i was able to hear audio from a tv show (a stupid one where idiots are left "stranded" on an island but with cineoperators all around, for the amusement of old farts) from the software radio. there is a world out there
oh one more thing. with whip antennas you will achieve ZERO. just fm commercial radio. at least a cheap dipole antenna is needed. rtl-sdr.com makes a kit that is indeed cheap but very effective. will bring to life the tuner that is otherwise useless. the dipole can be expanded and retracted to fit the wavelenght, there is a calculator if you don't want to do the math: Dipole Calculator | Antenna Length Calculator
we have a view all connected with raspberry pi computers used for hab balloon tracking, ads-b tracking, wsjt-x, and media server
