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SDR Hardware??

Posted: Wed Dec 16, 2015 8:56 pm
by seaton
This is mainly directed at BJay after our discussion at Robofaire on SDR.

My Question is what hardware should I look at if I want to play around with it?

One of our directors at work is concerned his office is bugged so I thought it a good opportunity to have a play around with SDR.

Stephen...

Re: SDR Hardware??

Posted: Thu Dec 17, 2015 2:18 pm
by seaton
Ended up purchasing a HackRF One from Qld so might have it in my hot little hands by early next week just in time for the Christmas break to start a playing!

Re: SDR Hardware??

Posted: Thu Dec 17, 2015 6:34 pm
by parkview
No mucking around with a dx.com $20 el-cheapo SDR. Straight into a real SDR: https://greatscottgadgets.com/hackrf/ :)

Looking fwd to seeing how it works at the Feb. 2016 Meeting!

Re: SDR Hardware??

Posted: Wed Dec 23, 2015 9:26 pm
by parkview
Two things I have going on my dx.com $20 RF tuner:
1) I can control it via the command line, ie:
rtl_fm -f 94.1e6 -M wbfm -s 200000 -r 48000 - | aplay -r 48k -f S16_LE

2) I installed: https://github.com/ha7ilm/qtcsdr ; it's a simple GUI front end to something like the above CLI tool. Here is a screen shot:
QTCSDR_Screenshot.jpg
QTCSDR_Screenshot.jpg (120.72 KiB) Viewed 10816 times


I can type in a frequency, or just click on anything of interest on the waterfall graph and the it will change to that frequency. I am still using the ridiculously small 14cm antenna that came with it, but placed by my windows does pick up quite a few radio stations as you can see by the waterfall chart above.

Above, I am centred on 94.1 - JJJ. The other dark line off to the left is 93.3 - Classic FM.

Now, onto trying to figure out how to build a AM demodulator in GNU Radio :D

Re: SDR Hardware??

Posted: Wed Dec 23, 2015 9:27 pm
by parkview
Hey BeJay, what software did you use for your demo project at the Robofair?

Re: SDR Hardware??

Posted: Mon Dec 28, 2015 8:24 am
by BeJay
Hi Guys,

Sorry I completely missed this post. I am using a $6 Realtek RTL2832U from ebay. On my netbook at Robofair I was running gqrx from http://gqrx.dk/ which is really nice and lightweight, but won't run on a pi - minimum is x86 2 cores. I hadn't found qtcsdr by that time to run on the pi, so I made a quick gambas touch screen GUI for rtl_fm.

Image

I've also found there is a library for python https://github.com/roger-/pyrtlsdr , so I will attempt (time permitting) to make a GUI for that and the interface to the rotary encoders.

Re: SDR Hardware??

Posted: Mon Dec 28, 2015 1:03 pm
by parkview
Thanks for the info BeJay. I have never played with Gambas: http://gambas.sourceforge.net/en/main.html It looks interesting, but I might have a play with the Python module you mentioned. It's been donkeys years since I touched Visual Basic. That was my pre Delphi programming days.