I got a walkie talkie set as a Christmas present when I was 8. Which was kind of an evil thing to do given I had no siblings or friends to play with. One day I turned one set on and listened for a while and I thought I heard someone talking behind all the static noise. So I said something and was shocked to hear the voice talking back to me. Fast forward a few decades, next week is my wedding and that voice on the other side of the radio is my best man.
my family had a little portable TV (GE 7-7150B, link below) that we'd usually only use down in the basement during severe weather.
one day I learned that you could tune in all sorts of non-TV frequencies. In particular, you could tune into any phone calls my neighbors were making on their wireless phones.
i loved that little tv and used it up until the conversion to digital OTA tranmissions.
The paging system was unencrypted around here the last I looked (that was during covid). And there was software that could decode the transmissions. The SDR would easily pick it up.
One of the hospitals had been using it and would page people with PII -- including which people were in which room. So you could kinda see what was happening in the hospitals -- particularly during covid.
There kinda was a life cycle, seeing people admitted, O2 alerts firing off, and then the morgue being called to a room.
Overall, it was both interesting to have insight into something that you weren't ever going to be allowed to have access, and also very very sad.
Sadly, you can't really get NOAA satellite images any more. NOAA-15 and 19 were decommissioned August 19, 2025, and NOAA 18 was decommissioned in June. It's my understanding that you'll need a much more powerful antenna to get images from the new satellites. Still, SDR is great fun. It's incredible to realize that all this information is stored in electromagnetic waves and passing through us all the time.
I wonder what does it entail to have a NOAA satellite decommissioned? Is it just turned off or is it directed to fall down into a designated area in the Pacific?
They will continue to orbit for about 150 years, slowly falling towards earth until the drag from the atmosphere burns them up.
"Like many older satellites, the POES satellites do not have thrusters to support a controlled reentry into Earth’s atmosphere at the end of their mission life. Instead, once passivated, they are safely powered down, placed in a non-operational state, and left in a stable orbit. Without onboard propulsion or significant atmospheric drag at their current altitude, NOAA estimates they will remain in orbit for roughly 150 years before gradually reentering the atmosphere and disintegrating."[1]
I depends on the orbit. The low Earth ones would usually be de-orbited and fall back to Earth. The geosychronous ones are usually just moved to a parking orbit out of the way to make room for more. If it's in a high but not very crowded orbit, they might just stop using it.
I was informed maybe 7 or 8 years back that my electric company would be replacing my analog meter with a smart one and always intended to try and glean more information about my electric consumption habits from it. It took me a lot longer than I intended, but last year I finally bought an RTL-SDR in the hopes of being able to get realtime info from the meter. Unfortunately, it seems that it's not one of the ones that emits consumption info over ISM bands for consumption by household appliances (so far as I can tell) and I ended up only capturing info from TPMS sensors off of passing cars (which was cool, but not really what I was looking for).
Do note that if you purchase an RTL-SDR these days, you'll probably get a v4 which, at least as of last year, does not play out-of-the-box at all with the software available on the Ubuntu apt repos and the RTL-SDR drivers that ship with 24.04 out-of-the-box — there were some hardware protocol/interface changes between v3 and v4 that make the old drivers incompatible and you'll get a litany of misleading or non-specific errors if you try without downloading and installing the latest drivers from GitHub (or somewhere).
Look into Rainforest Automation. I have their EMU-2 which can be paired with my electric meter. It spits out XML data which can be read by Home Assistant.
A number of smart meters communicate over the mains wires, especially when they're in very sparse areas. There was even a thought for a bit to offer internet services over the power distribution cables, but I don't think they ever really got effective data rates high enough to be competitive.
Yes, that seems to be what mine is doing as my ecobee thermostat is able to read info about peak usage times from the mains. I didn't know about the latter part though, I never imagined electric companies were making a play for the internet (though it seems like an obvious thought in retrospect).
A few months ago when there was a lot of emergency services activity in my area and I didn't know why, I was reminded that no-one in my region is contributing a feed to Broadcastify.
I went down the tunnel of using SDR to recieve those transmissions, and share them online.
Then I went a bit further.
What if you could transcribe the broadcasts into something like a text feed? What if you could add location information somehow to monitor where things were going on in your region? Could you use AI to somehow organize the data into a more useful format?
What if this data was valuable? Maybe you could sell this as a service? Who would buy it? Public safety organizations? Hospitals? News organizations?
I spent a few days worth of freetime figuring out how you'd do someting like this, and got to a place where I figured it was conceptually possible.
Then somewhere in my googling, I stumbled across this site: http://citizen.com/ - and realized that someone had already turned my idea into what looks like a pretty mature product.
Ahh well. I'm sure my billion dollar idea will come later.
In the meantime, I'd still like to mess with SDR at least so I can know what's going on around me next time there's a fire or other public safety incident, before it gets reported on.
The fact that there's a mature product doing what you want to do is a good thing. It means there's a market for what you want that's large enough to sustain development.
You can easily distinguish yourself from Citizen by targeting a different demographic, different branding, different UX, interpreting the data in a different way.
Just look at how many businesses there are in any industry that deliver the same outcome for their customers but in a slightly different way.
What you're describing could be a really good news source giving live on-the-ground information to people.
I don't know about billion dollar ideas, but I encourage you to make a product even if something similar exists.
If you squint enough there is nothing new under the sun and chances are that you will take a very long time to find something that hasn't already been done!
But doing your own product does several things - you learn a lot, you position yourself for future success, you see future ideas differently. And maybe you're okay for something to not be a billion dollar idea and you can outlast a venture funded product.
Maybe I'm just projecting, because I've put of building something for such a long time!
> I encourage you to make a product even if something similar exists.
This is very good advice: we often give up on "great ideas" once we find that they have already been done.
But the vast majority of people we consider successful did not invent anything completely new, they just made a better kind of XYZ, sometimes not even that dramatically different. If you think about it, it's a much more logical path to success than expecting to be the next DaVinci.
My actual "MVP" was some kind of automated neighborhood newsletter, that'd monitor emergency services radio traffic, and put together some kind of "here's what happened in your neighborhood" daily newsletter.
Maybe I could get it packaged in a hardware/software package that let anyone set one up in their neighborhood.
But I mostly got stuck in privacy concerns. I'm not sure it's a valuable public service to let people know that, for example, someone had a heart attack a few blocks over.
I did think about the scientific value of some kind of statistical database that process and recorded emergency services calls though. But mostly, my ideas for commercial and moral opportunities were half-baked at the point that I discovered citizen.
One of the technical challenges I came up against was finding transcription software that could semi-accurately transcribe UHF/VHF radio traffic. However, it looks like there's some progress that's been made there since I last checked: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/radiotransciptor-real-time-radio-spe...
> But I mostly got stuck in privacy concerns. I'm not sure it's a valuable public service to let people know that, for example, someone had a heart attack a few blocks over.
In the moment, notifying people who know CPR and may be nearby and able to get to a nearby location and start CPR before emergency services arrives is the base of PulsePoint [1], which seems like a useful public service.
As a digest, yeah, I don't think any usefulness outweighs the invasion of privacy. Maybe just a count of health emergencies responded to for observing trends.
Citizen is really enshittified, so any alternative would be better. I don’t object to them charging for their service, but they use all kinds of predatory editorial tactics and push notifications and marketing copy to instill primal fear that your neighborhood is imminently burning down and you will get shot if you don’t subscribe to a higher tier of service from them. Crime is way down in the US but you really don’t feel that way when you are a subscriber/user of Citizen.
Receiving 433Mhz sensor data using rtl_433[0] with an RTL SDR was a lot of fun when I started doing it last year. There's MQTT output if you want to send it to Home Assistant, et. al., as well as simple text output to stdout. It was great fun seeing my neighbors' sensors, tire pressure sensors in passing vehicles, etc.
There a ton of devices that use 433Mhz. You can also extend rtl_433 pretty easily.
A lot of the 433/915 band devices you can pick up with rtl_433 seem to be much more bullet proof and have longer battery life than equivalent WiFi and Zigbee devices too. Building new protocol decoders for rtl_433 also surprisingly isn't too bad either. One of my favorite ones is the water meter decoder which has saved me a lot of money when I've had irrigation water leaks and not noticed them (but saw conspicuous usage patterns reported).
ive got ~15 deployed sensors/transmitters and I haven't touched a single one in 14 months since initial setup. its super reliable if you can get your receiver/antenna somewhere that works well.
I'm spoiled. One of my receivers is on a second story and has great line-of-sight to a bunch of houses and a parking lot (where I assume I get a lot of my TPMS "hits").
I was able to read some data from my electric meter, but the good stuff is encrypted.
What I was _really_ hoping to read was my water meter. It transmits so infrequently, though, so it's hard get much of anything or even know if you're successfully receiving something more than noise.
Astonishing! Thank you very much for sharing..
This sentence really stuck out for me - "I was proud! I was tired! I was amazed that all those things I received are all around us, everywhere, all at once – if you know where to look. :O"
I've been wanting to experiment with SDR triangulation. There are some off the shelf options, but I think it would be fun to cobble something together using dongles.
For triangulation though, if you have a reference signal at a known location, TDoA (time difference of arrival) requires less hardware (just a single receiver at each location, e.g. an RTL-SDR). I don't know of any open-source software which does that though I've been slowly building some for my own use (it's pretty janky at the moment).
One of the people in my local radio club did a demonstration of tracking down a commercial operation using amateur radio frequencies with the KrakenSDR. It's very impressive. I think the timing would be much more difficult using off the shelf dongles.
People are commenting about issues loading the images leading to them abandoning reading the article. Here is a fully cached copy of TFA, but note that the videos (and images, but especially the videos) load _really_ slowly https://web.archive.org/web/20240317122351/https://blinry.or... (but they do load if you wait long enough).
Over a decade ago I played with SDR sharp and a tv dongle and got to listen to very cool stuff. I don’t know if SDR sharp still exists, I think it was closed source at the time but free. I remember one could use it to decode stuff and then map to virtual ports to redirect to other software that expected an input from specialized hardware like ship signals and stuff like that.
Like 13 years ago when I was doing FPV I remember soldering my own skew-planar/quadrifilar antennas with bendable wire ha, the photo of the short yellow dipole reminded me of it. I think it's a dipole or double-dipole not sure.
This page was very slow to load for me, probably partly because it's being hugged by HN. But it would help a lot if images had the `loading="lazy"` attribute, and if they were compressed to about ~100KiB each instead.
Hope they have an unlimited bandwidth plan. I bailed out at about #20, which is unfortunate because it's otherwise a nice list. I'm going to assume 51. Get a Free Kia, isn't part of it.
I cant speak to 2G networks, but 5G (and 4G) are amazingly simple to get started using OpenAirInterface. With a USRP B210 I had a 5G network running from a bare Ubuntu install in under 30 minutes. I used a smartphone and some cheap (blank, user-writable) SIM cards to connect and test it.
Gabe just quit his dayjob to go full-time on SaveItForParts, so hopefully we'll be seeing even more cool stuff in the near future. Me personally, I'm hoping for a collab between him and Jeff. They've had some interaction already (Jeff donated Gabe a spare computer he had lying around) so maybe... That would be epic if it did happen.
more than 15 years ago I got a chance to play with gnu radio and back then it was hailed as the next big industry.. fast forward, and beyond the hacking community (and the hobbyist), it still has not taken over.
My impression is that gnuradio is fine for prototyping/poc, but has issues in its design when you try and run production workloads with more complex workflows (ie, writing custom Mac layers/ workflows that involve heavy feedback, etc. you end up having to do a a lot of hacking around with the message passing infrastructure).
That being said last I used it extensively was v3 so maybe v4 is better. Did they get rid of thread per block and allow you to have a single thread service a sub signal chain? I remember that the number of context switches between threads, and balancing latency vs buffer sizes was a pain in the rear.
The threading model is still difficult, and it's still enough slower that thinking you're going to be comparable to custom silicon that's been designed for a particular protocol is silly.
It's great fun for doing signal analysis, but I'd never want to try and implement a full-duplex communication system in production with it.
FWIW, if you have an SDR that doesn't work with the frequency you want to work with, you may be able to use an up-converter or down-converter in front of the SDR to shift the frequency enough to work. There are ones like the Ham It Up[1], etc. that may be appropriate depending on the circumstances. Or you could possibly build your own.
You can get an AD9363 clone of the USRP b210 online for like, 300 USD?
The AD9363 stock is only supposed to be 325mhz to 3.8ghz but stuff like the plutoSDR which uses it manages to get the transceiver all the way from 70mhz to 6ghz like the more expensive AD9361 used in the real USRP B210s
Benefit is you can transmit stuff too, not just receive unlike the RTL-SDR which is RX only
Is there anything like this that can go down to 15 MHz or lower? including transmit and several analog modes of modulation USB LSB NFM WFM AM CW at least
Groovy. Are there any limiting factors such as processor speed and what is the best software that does it all on Linux? I have no idea what ratio of magic smoke is in the software vs. ratio of magic smoke is in the hardware.
Quite a few radar systems are in the 8-10GHz range and satellite communications just above that. The general idea when using a SDR for these things is to have a separate frequency converter & amplifier at the antenna feed itself, then have an intermediate frequency <6GHz fed via cable to the SDR. Tends to be much easier and cheaper this way.
I got a walkie talkie set as a Christmas present when I was 8. Which was kind of an evil thing to do given I had no siblings or friends to play with. One day I turned one set on and listened for a while and I thought I heard someone talking behind all the static noise. So I said something and was shocked to hear the voice talking back to me. Fast forward a few decades, next week is my wedding and that voice on the other side of the radio is my best man.
Congrats! That's such a cool story!
>Fast forward a few decades, next week is my wedding and that voice on the other side of the radio is...
I think I've seen too many rom-coms because I was sure this sentence going to end with "my fiance." : )
my family had a little portable TV (GE 7-7150B, link below) that we'd usually only use down in the basement during severe weather.
one day I learned that you could tune in all sorts of non-TV frequencies. In particular, you could tune into any phone calls my neighbors were making on their wireless phones.
i loved that little tv and used it up until the conversion to digital OTA tranmissions.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4qYPLd8owc
I expected the voice on the other side being your soon-to-be wife. But good story nevertheless. Congrats!
damn, that's awesome.. I feel like I just watched the opening scene of a nice "stand by me" type movie.
This is awesome, and future congratulations on your wedding!
This is awesome, and congratulations!
I got chills reading this. Congrats!
The paging system was unencrypted around here the last I looked (that was during covid). And there was software that could decode the transmissions. The SDR would easily pick it up.
One of the hospitals had been using it and would page people with PII -- including which people were in which room. So you could kinda see what was happening in the hospitals -- particularly during covid.
There kinda was a life cycle, seeing people admitted, O2 alerts firing off, and then the morgue being called to a room.
Overall, it was both interesting to have insight into something that you weren't ever going to be allowed to have access, and also very very sad.
Sadly, you can't really get NOAA satellite images any more. NOAA-15 and 19 were decommissioned August 19, 2025, and NOAA 18 was decommissioned in June. It's my understanding that you'll need a much more powerful antenna to get images from the new satellites. Still, SDR is great fun. It's incredible to realize that all this information is stored in electromagnetic waves and passing through us all the time.
Oh that's too bad, I had done this in the past and it was good fun.
I wonder what does it entail to have a NOAA satellite decommissioned? Is it just turned off or is it directed to fall down into a designated area in the Pacific?
They will continue to orbit for about 150 years, slowly falling towards earth until the drag from the atmosphere burns them up.
"Like many older satellites, the POES satellites do not have thrusters to support a controlled reentry into Earth’s atmosphere at the end of their mission life. Instead, once passivated, they are safely powered down, placed in a non-operational state, and left in a stable orbit. Without onboard propulsion or significant atmospheric drag at their current altitude, NOAA estimates they will remain in orbit for roughly 150 years before gradually reentering the atmosphere and disintegrating."[1]
[1] https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/news/legacy-orbit-noaa-decommiss...
It sucks they power it down
Probably to recover the frequency for a newer satellite. The spectrum they transmit on is quite scarce.
How locked down are they? Should I expect to see a hacker conference talk "how i revived a weather satellite"?
Maybe once they're turned off they're irrecoverable?
Makes total sense, thank you
I depends on the orbit. The low Earth ones would usually be de-orbited and fall back to Earth. The geosychronous ones are usually just moved to a parking orbit out of the way to make room for more. If it's in a high but not very crowded orbit, they might just stop using it.
I was informed maybe 7 or 8 years back that my electric company would be replacing my analog meter with a smart one and always intended to try and glean more information about my electric consumption habits from it. It took me a lot longer than I intended, but last year I finally bought an RTL-SDR in the hopes of being able to get realtime info from the meter. Unfortunately, it seems that it's not one of the ones that emits consumption info over ISM bands for consumption by household appliances (so far as I can tell) and I ended up only capturing info from TPMS sensors off of passing cars (which was cool, but not really what I was looking for).
Do note that if you purchase an RTL-SDR these days, you'll probably get a v4 which, at least as of last year, does not play out-of-the-box at all with the software available on the Ubuntu apt repos and the RTL-SDR drivers that ship with 24.04 out-of-the-box — there were some hardware protocol/interface changes between v3 and v4 that make the old drivers incompatible and you'll get a litany of misleading or non-specific errors if you try without downloading and installing the latest drivers from GitHub (or somewhere).
Look into Rainforest Automation. I have their EMU-2 which can be paired with my electric meter. It spits out XML data which can be read by Home Assistant.
https://www.rainforestautomation.com/rfa-z105-2-emu-2-2/
A number of smart meters communicate over the mains wires, especially when they're in very sparse areas. There was even a thought for a bit to offer internet services over the power distribution cables, but I don't think they ever really got effective data rates high enough to be competitive.
Yes, that seems to be what mine is doing as my ecobee thermostat is able to read info about peak usage times from the mains. I didn't know about the latter part though, I never imagined electric companies were making a play for the internet (though it seems like an obvious thought in retrospect).
A few months ago when there was a lot of emergency services activity in my area and I didn't know why, I was reminded that no-one in my region is contributing a feed to Broadcastify.
I went down the tunnel of using SDR to recieve those transmissions, and share them online.
Then I went a bit further.
What if you could transcribe the broadcasts into something like a text feed? What if you could add location information somehow to monitor where things were going on in your region? Could you use AI to somehow organize the data into a more useful format?
What if this data was valuable? Maybe you could sell this as a service? Who would buy it? Public safety organizations? Hospitals? News organizations?
I spent a few days worth of freetime figuring out how you'd do someting like this, and got to a place where I figured it was conceptually possible.
Then somewhere in my googling, I stumbled across this site: http://citizen.com/ - and realized that someone had already turned my idea into what looks like a pretty mature product.
Ahh well. I'm sure my billion dollar idea will come later.
In the meantime, I'd still like to mess with SDR at least so I can know what's going on around me next time there's a fire or other public safety incident, before it gets reported on.
The fact that there's a mature product doing what you want to do is a good thing. It means there's a market for what you want that's large enough to sustain development.
You can easily distinguish yourself from Citizen by targeting a different demographic, different branding, different UX, interpreting the data in a different way.
Just look at how many businesses there are in any industry that deliver the same outcome for their customers but in a slightly different way.
What you're describing could be a really good news source giving live on-the-ground information to people.
I don't know about billion dollar ideas, but I encourage you to make a product even if something similar exists.
If you squint enough there is nothing new under the sun and chances are that you will take a very long time to find something that hasn't already been done!
But doing your own product does several things - you learn a lot, you position yourself for future success, you see future ideas differently. And maybe you're okay for something to not be a billion dollar idea and you can outlast a venture funded product.
Maybe I'm just projecting, because I've put of building something for such a long time!
> I encourage you to make a product even if something similar exists.
This is very good advice: we often give up on "great ideas" once we find that they have already been done.
But the vast majority of people we consider successful did not invent anything completely new, they just made a better kind of XYZ, sometimes not even that dramatically different. If you think about it, it's a much more logical path to success than expecting to be the next DaVinci.
I was joking about the billion dollar idea.
My actual "MVP" was some kind of automated neighborhood newsletter, that'd monitor emergency services radio traffic, and put together some kind of "here's what happened in your neighborhood" daily newsletter.
Maybe I could get it packaged in a hardware/software package that let anyone set one up in their neighborhood.
But I mostly got stuck in privacy concerns. I'm not sure it's a valuable public service to let people know that, for example, someone had a heart attack a few blocks over.
I did think about the scientific value of some kind of statistical database that process and recorded emergency services calls though. But mostly, my ideas for commercial and moral opportunities were half-baked at the point that I discovered citizen.
One of the technical challenges I came up against was finding transcription software that could semi-accurately transcribe UHF/VHF radio traffic. However, it looks like there's some progress that's been made there since I last checked: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/radiotransciptor-real-time-radio-spe...
> But I mostly got stuck in privacy concerns. I'm not sure it's a valuable public service to let people know that, for example, someone had a heart attack a few blocks over.
In the moment, notifying people who know CPR and may be nearby and able to get to a nearby location and start CPR before emergency services arrives is the base of PulsePoint [1], which seems like a useful public service.
As a digest, yeah, I don't think any usefulness outweighs the invasion of privacy. Maybe just a count of health emergencies responded to for observing trends.
[1] https://www.pulsepoint.org/
Citizen is really enshittified, so any alternative would be better. I don’t object to them charging for their service, but they use all kinds of predatory editorial tactics and push notifications and marketing copy to instill primal fear that your neighborhood is imminently burning down and you will get shot if you don’t subscribe to a higher tier of service from them. Crime is way down in the US but you really don’t feel that way when you are a subscriber/user of Citizen.
That was the vibe I was getting when visiting the site, they seem to understand fear pretty well. Stay away for your own mental health :-)
Related. Others?
Fifty Things you can do with a Software Defined Radio - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39728153 - March 2024 (40 comments)
Receiving 433Mhz sensor data using rtl_433[0] with an RTL SDR was a lot of fun when I started doing it last year. There's MQTT output if you want to send it to Home Assistant, et. al., as well as simple text output to stdout. It was great fun seeing my neighbors' sensors, tire pressure sensors in passing vehicles, etc.
There a ton of devices that use 433Mhz. You can also extend rtl_433 pretty easily.
[0] https://github.com/merbanan/rtl_433
A lot of the 433/915 band devices you can pick up with rtl_433 seem to be much more bullet proof and have longer battery life than equivalent WiFi and Zigbee devices too. Building new protocol decoders for rtl_433 also surprisingly isn't too bad either. One of my favorite ones is the water meter decoder which has saved me a lot of money when I've had irrigation water leaks and not noticed them (but saw conspicuous usage patterns reported).
ive got ~15 deployed sensors/transmitters and I haven't touched a single one in 14 months since initial setup. its super reliable if you can get your receiver/antenna somewhere that works well.
WAY cheaper than the other options too.
I was hoping to find more devices around me which use 433. Apparently my neighbors don't have any 433MHz devices.
I'm spoiled. One of my receivers is on a second story and has great line-of-sight to a bunch of houses and a parking lot (where I assume I get a lot of my TPMS "hits").
I was able to read some data from my electric meter, but the good stuff is encrypted.
What I was _really_ hoping to read was my water meter. It transmits so infrequently, though, so it's hard get much of anything or even know if you're successfully receiving something more than noise.
Astonishing! Thank you very much for sharing.. This sentence really stuck out for me - "I was proud! I was tired! I was amazed that all those things I received are all around us, everywhere, all at once – if you know where to look. :O"
I've been wanting to experiment with SDR triangulation. There are some off the shelf options, but I think it would be fun to cobble something together using dongles.
https://www.crowdsupply.com/krakenrf/krakensdr
https://khanfar-spectrum-analyzer.web.app/ also has some phase-based direction-finding software and upcoming hardware.
For triangulation though, if you have a reference signal at a known location, TDoA (time difference of arrival) requires less hardware (just a single receiver at each location, e.g. an RTL-SDR). I don't know of any open-source software which does that though I've been slowly building some for my own use (it's pretty janky at the moment).
One of the people in my local radio club did a demonstration of tracking down a commercial operation using amateur radio frequencies with the KrakenSDR. It's very impressive. I think the timing would be much more difficult using off the shelf dongles.
People are commenting about issues loading the images leading to them abandoning reading the article. Here is a fully cached copy of TFA, but note that the videos (and images, but especially the videos) load _really_ slowly https://web.archive.org/web/20240317122351/https://blinry.or... (but they do load if you wait long enough).
Kudos! I needed a break from no.24 and am looking forward to reading the remaining uses. Awesome article and resource. Thank you.
Over a decade ago I played with SDR sharp and a tv dongle and got to listen to very cool stuff. I don’t know if SDR sharp still exists, I think it was closed source at the time but free. I remember one could use it to decode stuff and then map to virtual ports to redirect to other software that expected an input from specialized hardware like ship signals and stuff like that.
There is SDR++ : https://www.sdrpp.org/
https://archive.today/T0q8E
https://web.archive.org/web/20250908132643/https://blinry.or...
Like 13 years ago when I was doing FPV I remember soldering my own skew-planar/quadrifilar antennas with bendable wire ha, the photo of the short yellow dipole reminded me of it. I think it's a dipole or double-dipole not sure.
edit: I think it's just a dipole
I have been feeding ADSB data to public feeds for almost two years now: https://i.imgur.com/p9dRiVP.png
It runs on an Orange Pi Zero 3 SBC.
This page was very slow to load for me, probably partly because it's being hugged by HN. But it would help a lot if images had the `loading="lazy"` attribute, and if they were compressed to about ~100KiB each instead.
Hope they have an unlimited bandwidth plan. I bailed out at about #20, which is unfortunate because it's otherwise a nice list. I'm going to assume 51. Get a Free Kia, isn't part of it.
I always forget that the US still has bandwidth caps.. something which has never really existed where I live for fixed broadband.
Nice blog. It would be great if there was a table of contents to see everything at a glance.
I have a USRP B210 and its great fun for many things. One of my favorite things to do is create a small 2G GSM base station to use old phones!
You say this as if it's an easy thing anybody might do -- like putting flowers in a vase in the kitchen. Isn't it pretty complicated?
I cant speak to 2G networks, but 5G (and 4G) are amazingly simple to get started using OpenAirInterface. With a USRP B210 I had a 5G network running from a bare Ubuntu install in under 30 minutes. I used a smartphone and some cheap (blank, user-writable) SIM cards to connect and test it.
Pictures are loading at a crawl, had to bail because the layout kept rerendering.
Looks like hug of death strikes again!
Very cool post. If Jeff Geerling is reading this, I wouldn't mind watching a video on each of these ;)
Check out saveitforparts on youtube, he does lots of this stuff.
Gabe just quit his dayjob to go full-time on SaveItForParts, so hopefully we'll be seeing even more cool stuff in the near future. Me personally, I'm hoping for a collab between him and Jeff. They've had some interaction already (Jeff donated Gabe a spare computer he had lying around) so maybe... That would be epic if it did happen.
more than 15 years ago I got a chance to play with gnu radio and back then it was hailed as the next big industry.. fast forward, and beyond the hacking community (and the hobbyist), it still has not taken over.
It's super popular within the RF industry.
But for the normal users - to be honest - most topics are too heavy on complex math. And there's no way to avoid it if you want results.
Most advanced radio stuff much more complicate than checking out a repo from GitHub and compiling it.
My impression is that gnuradio is fine for prototyping/poc, but has issues in its design when you try and run production workloads with more complex workflows (ie, writing custom Mac layers/ workflows that involve heavy feedback, etc. you end up having to do a a lot of hacking around with the message passing infrastructure).
That being said last I used it extensively was v3 so maybe v4 is better. Did they get rid of thread per block and allow you to have a single thread service a sub signal chain? I remember that the number of context switches between threads, and balancing latency vs buffer sizes was a pain in the rear.
The threading model is still difficult, and it's still enough slower that thinking you're going to be comparable to custom silicon that's been designed for a particular protocol is silly.
It's great fun for doing signal analysis, but I'd never want to try and implement a full-duplex communication system in production with it.
Is there SDR for the GHz range of signals used by modern equipment?
FWIW, if you have an SDR that doesn't work with the frequency you want to work with, you may be able to use an up-converter or down-converter in front of the SDR to shift the frequency enough to work. There are ones like the Ham It Up[1], etc. that may be appropriate depending on the circumstances. Or you could possibly build your own.
[1]: https://www.nooelec.com/store/sdr/sdr-addons/ham-it-up.html
You can get an AD9363 clone of the USRP b210 online for like, 300 USD?
The AD9363 stock is only supposed to be 325mhz to 3.8ghz but stuff like the plutoSDR which uses it manages to get the transceiver all the way from 70mhz to 6ghz like the more expensive AD9361 used in the real USRP B210s
Benefit is you can transmit stuff too, not just receive unlike the RTL-SDR which is RX only
Is there anything like this that can go down to 15 MHz or lower? including transmit and several analog modes of modulation USB LSB NFM WFM AM CW at least
If I understand what you're saying, you can do any modulation scheme with sdr, it doesnt depend on the model
Groovy. Are there any limiting factors such as processor speed and what is the best software that does it all on Linux? I have no idea what ratio of magic smoke is in the software vs. ratio of magic smoke is in the hardware.
HackRF One can go up to 6GHz ($400 new or $100 on alibaba for a similar device). Any higher frequency than that you'll be paying thousands.
Yeah I dont know any SDR above 6GHZ but also other than mmwave 5G I also dont know much radio that is above 6Ghz in general
Quite a few radar systems are in the 8-10GHz range and satellite communications just above that. The general idea when using a SDR for these things is to have a separate frequency converter & amplifier at the antenna feed itself, then have an intermediate frequency <6GHz fed via cable to the SDR. Tends to be much easier and cheaper this way.
Looks cool, except it uses USB2 which seems limiting in view of bandwidth.
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wow