Washing machines and cannibalism! Picked up a RTL-SDR a couple of weeks back and I'm obsessed. You offer some great tips that I'll be putting to use - thank you!
This reminds me of my childhood, my dad and brother and I playing with the shortwave radio/HAM bands just to see what was out there. The nights when we had big atmosphere storms and the TV signals would duct across from midwest USA were special.
Hi there! Me too. I still have my grandpa's ancient Juliet multiband radio. He taught me how to run long wire antennas and I spent so many nights lost in the rolling, shifting sea of energy that is shortwave. Also, I grew up in SE Michigan, and we could just barely pick up tv from Sarnia and Windsor across the Detroit River in Canada. I put so much energy into making antennas just for that... it was my White Whale before I ever understood what one was, lol. Eventually I was able to watch UHF 32, 42 and the ever elusive 54 which was French Canadian and ran actual R rated movies at night. For a kid in the 80s full of daydreams about electromagnetic signals from strange far away places, it might as well have been from a neighboring star system, lol. I was SO in love with radio back then. Those were days when the whole world seemed full of hidden magic crying to be exposed and explored. :-)
Thank you sir for the nice compliments. How would you like to see me make a video about SDR Console? My setup has changed quite a bit over the years and I feel like I'm due for a new video covering it.
Five years later, I'm watching my own work here and reading the comments and thinking, "Wow, not ONE person commented about me telling y'all to listen to washing machines..." X-D I've covered a LOT of ground in the five years since then... Maybe I should make another video. Maybe it's time. :-) If anyone's reading this... shoot me a reply and tell me what you'd rather see: SDRUno or SDR Console. Both are good in their own ways, both have weaknesses that the other doesn't. Makes it hard to choose a favorite but lately I've been all over SDRUno like white on rice. The fact that it has an actual scanner really helps. SDR Console doesn't, but you can make a crap ton of individual receivers in it which is amazing in itself when properly abused, and the interface on SDR Console feels just so natural. SDRUno's interface feels a lot more fiddly to me when I'm working a band really hard.
This is an amazing video. Thanks for sharing. I just started with sdr, mostly for snooping digital signals, iot etc, but I've been slowly diving into other things like trunked, sat, adbs. It's very rewarding.
@@nsknyc Thanks! SDRs are truly amazing tech, makes me feel much the way I did when I got to use my first "police scanner" radio, except the raw power-user factor of SDR is just so far beyond anything that we had before it, it's just crazy. Also I'm kinda psyched for solar cycle 25, hoping it will bring the life back into HF. I miss the days of hearing crazy signals from super far away. :-)
@@chestnutplanter For a noob, you really need to decide whether you love it, hate it, or somewhere in the middle, before you go throwing money at it. Me, I'm insane about radio so there's really no question that I want to ride that rocket to apogee. But if I wasn't so nuts about it, I'd want to go cheap till I knew if I had the bug or not. To that end, and especially knowing what I know now, I'd get the Nooelec $42 cheapie starter kit that has the 25 - 1700MHz USB stick, telescoping and mag mount antennas. It'll work with Raspberry Pi if you want to get super weird about it, or of course Desktop PC, laptop PC and tablets and phones with some help from an OTG cable. Stick the mag mount antenna some place high up and lose yourself in VHF, UHF, microwave and quite possibly CB, get a feel for what's out there, and if you start feeling the need to go into HF, get the upconverter box which works surprisingly well and will get you all the AM and HF stuff including SSB mode reception. You can also use some tricks on PCs and laptops to decode lots and lots of digital transmissions. One word of caution - the cheap sticks do not do HF on their own. It's too low. They also generally have a lot of self generated interference spikes some of which may get in the way of your target frequency. More expensive all in one units tend to handle this problem nicely, but they come with their own issues at times. Just the same, if you want it all in one box and done well, I find the SDRPlay units hard to beat. Another interesting thing I see on Amazon is portable Malahit self contained SDRs with inbuilt displays, like a full on portable radio. I don't know how they perform overall but they do look interesting. Had I the money to throw at it just willy nilly, I probably would.
Another note, regarding the use of CW mode to pick signals apart - Oddly enough, I've found even that ADS-B responds the best, audio wise, to SSB or CW modes. In the other modes, it's barely discernible from the background noise. In CW, it sounds like a harsh, raspy buzz, a bit like the sound a wasp's wings make when it bumps against something in flight.
@@keithglimmer4505 Yes, but in the audio component only. The radio transmission itself is single sideband AM but the information is carried by a shifting tone that determines the brightness of the plot, and there is of course a sync pulse to keep things plotting straight. It's hard to tell by listening that it is FM encoded since most transmissions are simple black/white, but if you ever get a grayscale image coming in such as a weather satellite photo, you can clearly hear the wavering tone, just as in the NOAA VHF APT transmissions.
@@NightRunner417 HF fax has no amplitude modulation. It's a frequency modulated SSB transmission. Not sure about vhf fax. I've been able to receive some cool Japanese fax stations from my location in the central U S. I've always wanted to copy JJY which still transmits news in Japanese and English but they are a tough catch. I've copied it from a few remote sdr's but never direct.
This info is mindblowing n shows u how desperately paranoid this world has become about the most harmless of things. I'm pretty sure no one is going to harass or terrorize anyone by listening to *public* airwaves with an SDR, especially the mostly dead HF portion of the radio spectrum.
If you want something insanely fun to try and yet also surprisingly challenging yet easy for even the cheap SDRs, try out decoding NOAA sats on 137 MHz. You can take it as far as you want to go, even making specialized quadrifilar helix antennas to get max clarity. They broadcast a scanline image of whatever is below them, mapping the entire Earth twice a day. Cool part is that you always get your own area as the sat passes over, and also you get to hear the doppler shift in the signal from the insane velocity of the satellite in motion toward then away from you.
Thank you for this video much needed to prove where the signal is coming from for court. They have junkies blasting an RF frequency at my house and head.
For that purpose I'd get one that has the highest receive frequency you can get since it is not known how high the suspected bug frequency operates on...
I just got the RTL-SDR Blog V.3 days ago. I have been a radio nut for years I can't believe I didn't know about these till a couple months ago. It's almost but not quite(too many images) as good as my $400 HF receiver and $400 digital scanner in one. I just wish I has just got the $20 dongle and used the extra $10 for a couple of adapters for my outside sky loop and scanner antennas.
Thanks, Dave. I've used a few of the cheap Nooelec RTLSDR dongles, which aren't terrible at for VHF and up but suck balls for HF, so you need to use a converter like HamItUp to get HF. When you do that, they are truly passable for HF use. I'm an HF enthusiast from way back, so I wasn't satisfied and ended up getting an SDRPlay RSP and then the SDRPlay RSP2 when it came out. I won't tell you that they are total showstoppers, but they are quite good on all the bands. One drawback is that support isn't as good for the SDRPlay, so you have less options, but that really only applies to more advanced uses. It'll get better, I'm sure, and maybe it already is because I haven't even looked in a long time. The SDRPlay RSP uses SDRUno by default, which is actually a great little SDR program with a lot of options and great performance. You can also force it to use the other popular programs if you hunt around for drivers. I like it, a lot, but you have to be serious because they are pricey. Were I you, I'd get myself a discone antenna and stick it in your attic if you can. They perform really well on all things above HF. For HF, I put a huge single turn loop of wire across my ceiling in the living room and fed it into a 1:4 current balun. Works great on HF, far better than the discone or a simple wire or dipole antenna indoors. An outdoor giant loop would be the best for HF but not many people can manage it.
Hi when I run DSD with HDSdR I change my sound card to VAC1 I can decode DMR but I cannot listen to analog signals without changing the sound card setting back to the speakers how can I change this so I can hear all signals please
Oh it's been too long since I was doing it to remember exactly how... but I had this crazy way of hopping the connections around so that I got it to where I could listen and decode at the same time. I'm not even set up for it now but if I come back around to it and I can reteach myself how to do it, I'll post it.
@@vicentecamilo5636 This bit of sad news from the website: Q: Where can I download the source code for HDSDR? A: Source code for HDSDR is not available. HDSDR is not ‘Open Source’, and is licensed as ‘Freeware’;. However, Alberto di Bene did release the source code for Winrad v1.32 as public domain software.
I have one of these: @t I can receive FM stations in 88-108 Mhz range with good sound. When I switch to direct sampling and with long aerial into HF socket I can see many good strong signals in MW and HF bands. But when I tune in to the signal peaks I never get any audio. Maybe just a hum at best. I try all demodulation settings. Any thoughts?
What model of SDR are you using? If it's not built for HF and MW, then you may only be picking up interference lines which of course will almost always sound very electrical, harsh rasps and buzzings. You can still do lower frequency bands even with the cheapie SDR sticks but you'll need an upconverter, and they do work really well. Also, bear in mind that if you're doing longwire antennae indoors, you're going to get A LOT of electrical and appliance interference. MW and HF only really get good when you get out of the house. I threw a typical scanner discone antenna literally on top of the sheet metal of my porch roof (it's really just standing there on it's ground cone, lol) and I get decent HF out of it. Sure it could be better but it's practically invisible and a huge upgrade from when I had it shoved into my attic, and the only indoor antenna I ever had or built that could beat it was my ceiling mounted magnetic loop, which was a big pain in the ass due to the very narrow bandwidth.
@@NightRunner417 thanks for the reply . I have one of these: www.qsl.net/pa2ohh/19rtlsdrlop.htm . There are big signal peaks appearing in HF band but I can't demodulate them to audio , tried LSB USB etc
@@ThinFreddysFlop Ok, so I had a look and I _think_ what you have is R820 based , which serves as the basis for all the common USB stick type SDR dongles. I don't have experience with yours specifically, but I've had three of the RTL-SDR sticks and did quite a bit with them before getting a Ham-It-Up upconverter for HF (which works really well, actually) and ultimately an SDRPlay RSP 1 and then an RSP 2 Pro. You might at this point be asking yourself "But NightRunner! You already had THREE R820 sticks and a Ham It Up! Whyever did you need two SDRPlay units??" Well that would be mainly because when I attached a long wire directly to the sampling inputs of the R820 sticks, the results were _pathetic_ at best. Like you, I got strong lines of crap in the waterfall, almost all of which were electrical interference, and only one or two of the very high power HF radio broadcasting stations. No weak stuff like amateur radio or wefax or anything like that. The Ham It Up made them HF capable just fine, but then I had to have two devices going and ultimately the Ham It Up died, one of the sticks died later, and another broke, and at that point I was just over it and wanted something a little more pro that could do it all on just one USB device. Remember, just like I mentioned in the video, real signals will show a distinctive pattern when zoomed in on, so you can tell they're a signal even before you hear them. Interference will look like solid or fuzzy lines, will probably drift back and forth a bit, and will almost always show no discernable pattern. You can see exactly that in my video's thumbnail - regularly spaced lines of interference. Setting your SDR to one of these will only produce a hum or buzz, no matter what demodulation you choose, just like you're experiencing. I don't want to sound mean but I think you simply need a better setup. Try for a better antenna FIRST, since you already have SDR hardware you're testing out, and THEN if you still can't get anywhere, consider getting one of the more expensive SDRs that use designs other than R820. AirSpy, HackRF, LimeSDR, SDRPlay, stuff like those. Just make sure you do your homework before putting down the money, to make sure it's going to be good for what you want to do. Also bear in mind, these things are FIDDLY. All of them can be a pain in the ass, because we SDR people are a fringe tech community and support therefore is bullshit at best, lol. Can't tell you how many times I swore I hated the company that makes the SDRPlay units. They're great radios when everything's working right, but man when it isn't they'll for sure make you wanna scream.
@@NightRunner417 Many thanlNight runner, you've described what I have concluded. I got some MW stations using my TV aerial. I'm going to build an active antenna, Should be a big step forward.
@@ThinFreddysFlop If you want a fun project, try out magnetic loop antennas. You make a loop of wire about uhhhhhh 6' in diameter, open with a two inch gap at one side. Solder a common tuning capacitor across that gap so now it's essentially a tank circuit. At the opposite side, solder the cable shield directly to the wire loop. Run about a foot of wire from the center conductor to a spot about a foot up from that shield connection point, and form it into a flattened loop that follows the shape of the big loop like this: i.pinimg.com/originals/a0/b1/ef/a0b1ef16cfa398f6747008047c808639.jpg The capacitance determines what frequency it resonates at, with a bandwidth of no more than 500khz typically. They're tricky to tune but highly directional and extremely sensitive, being resonant and all. I built one on a huge PVC pipe cross affair using 1/2" copper waterline for the loop. It's a big awkward pain in the ass but great for say 5MHz to 15MHz and works really well indoors where signals have to penetrate a lot of material.
This one is called HDSDR. I was using it with uh... some cheap RTLSDR stick or another, probably one of the NooElec cheapies and the Ham-It-Up HF converter. Not long after I did this video, I got myself an SDRPlay (the original) and then I eventually got an SDRPlay RSP 2 Pro. Since then, I've been using either SDRUno or SDR Radio Console, depending on my mood and my mission. They're both quite good, but I find that SDRUno is a bit easier on CPU while SDR Radio Console is more CPU hungry but has some really nice features that SDRUno does not. You can make HDSDR work with the SDRPlay units, but the only real reason I can see to go there would be if you just gotta have your interface look like a ham rig, lol. For some real power mad SDR-ing, try setting up a bunch of simultaneous channels in SDR Radio Console. You can actually listen to a bunch of frequencies AT THE SAME TIME, even put some on the left audio channel and some on the right. Makes one feel sort of God-like... or at least NSA or CIA like.
The only way would be a downconverter... either that or a higher end SDR unit like the uhhhh what'sit... HackRF? I haven't looked into anything higher performance _(*more expensive*)_ than the SDRPlay because dude... my hobbies are gonna kill me as it is... so my experience in higher demand areas is pretty limited.
You guys owe me pizza and beer. Remember? Supposed to get together the night of the last full lunar eclipse and y'all sorta kinda *stood me up?* Ringin' any bells with y'all? Uh huh, that's what I thought.
Washing machines and cannibalism! Picked up a RTL-SDR a couple of weeks back and I'm obsessed. You offer some great tips that I'll be putting to use - thank you!
This reminds me of my childhood, my dad and brother and I playing with the shortwave radio/HAM bands just to see what was out there. The nights when we had big atmosphere storms and the TV signals would duct across from midwest USA were special.
Hi there! Me too. I still have my grandpa's ancient Juliet multiband radio. He taught me how to run long wire antennas and I spent so many nights lost in the rolling, shifting sea of energy that is shortwave. Also, I grew up in SE Michigan, and we could just barely pick up tv from Sarnia and Windsor across the Detroit River in Canada. I put so much energy into making antennas just for that... it was my White Whale before I ever understood what one was, lol. Eventually I was able to watch UHF 32, 42 and the ever elusive 54 which was French Canadian and ran actual R rated movies at night. For a kid in the 80s full of daydreams about electromagnetic signals from strange far away places, it might as well have been from a neighboring star system, lol. I was SO in love with radio back then. Those were days when the whole world seemed full of hidden magic crying to be exposed and explored. :-)
@@NightRunner417
Oh memories…. I am a Toronto local btw, so we’re in the same general bandwidth
You, SIR, are a wealth of SDR knowledge!!!!!!!! This is a GREAT video!!! Thank you for making it!
Thank you sir for the nice compliments. How would you like to see me make a video about SDR Console? My setup has changed quite a bit over the years and I feel like I'm due for a new video covering it.
That would be GREAT!
Five years later, I'm watching my own work here and reading the comments and thinking, "Wow, not ONE person commented about me telling y'all to listen to washing machines..." X-D
I've covered a LOT of ground in the five years since then... Maybe I should make another video. Maybe it's time. :-)
If anyone's reading this... shoot me a reply and tell me what you'd rather see: SDRUno or SDR Console. Both are good in their own ways, both have weaknesses that the other doesn't. Makes it hard to choose a favorite but lately I've been all over SDRUno like white on rice. The fact that it has an actual scanner really helps. SDR Console doesn't, but you can make a crap ton of individual receivers in it which is amazing in itself when properly abused, and the interface on SDR Console feels just so natural. SDRUno's interface feels a lot more fiddly to me when I'm working a band really hard.
I enjoy listening to my neighbours water pump in his hot tub.
This is an amazing video. Thanks for sharing. I just started with sdr, mostly for snooping digital signals, iot etc, but I've been slowly diving into other things like trunked, sat, adbs. It's very rewarding.
@@nsknyc Thanks! SDRs are truly amazing tech, makes me feel much the way I did when I got to use my first "police scanner" radio, except the raw power-user factor of SDR is just so far beyond anything that we had before it, it's just crazy. Also I'm kinda psyched for solar cycle 25, hoping it will bring the life back into HF. I miss the days of hearing crazy signals from super far away. :-)
@@NightRunner417 I'm just getting into radio and planning on taking the test soon. What kinda SDR rig would you recommend for a newby?
@@chestnutplanter For a noob, you really need to decide whether you love it, hate it, or somewhere in the middle, before you go throwing money at it. Me, I'm insane about radio so there's really no question that I want to ride that rocket to apogee. But if I wasn't so nuts about it, I'd want to go cheap till I knew if I had the bug or not. To that end, and especially knowing what I know now, I'd get the Nooelec $42 cheapie starter kit that has the 25 - 1700MHz USB stick, telescoping and mag mount antennas. It'll work with Raspberry Pi if you want to get super weird about it, or of course Desktop PC, laptop PC and tablets and phones with some help from an OTG cable. Stick the mag mount antenna some place high up and lose yourself in VHF, UHF, microwave and quite possibly CB, get a feel for what's out there, and if you start feeling the need to go into HF, get the upconverter box which works surprisingly well and will get you all the AM and HF stuff including SSB mode reception. You can also use some tricks on PCs and laptops to decode lots and lots of digital transmissions.
One word of caution - the cheap sticks do not do HF on their own. It's too low. They also generally have a lot of self generated interference spikes some of which may get in the way of your target frequency. More expensive all in one units tend to handle this problem nicely, but they come with their own issues at times. Just the same, if you want it all in one box and done well, I find the SDRPlay units hard to beat.
Another interesting thing I see on Amazon is portable Malahit self contained SDRs with inbuilt displays, like a full on portable radio. I don't know how they perform overall but they do look interesting. Had I the money to throw at it just willy nilly, I probably would.
Yay! another SDR Nerd,, like me.
Another note, regarding the use of CW mode to pick signals apart - Oddly enough, I've found even that ADS-B responds the best, audio wise, to SSB or CW modes. In the other modes, it's barely discernible from the background noise. In CW, it sounds like a harsh, raspy buzz, a bit like the sound a wasp's wings make when it bumps against something in flight.
and by the way a LNA is not a preamp its a amplifer there is diffrent between the two
@@AndrewMurphy8383 SETI doesn't like you.
www.setileague.org/hardware/blklna.htm
Thanks for the video.
You're welcome but don't thank me too much. I been slackin' _SO_ much.
@@NightRunner417 I’m just getting into the game and this is very helpful. Will definitely check out your other videos. Thanks again for the content.
Thanks for sharing, I'm just starting my SDR set up but i need lots of information yet.
Very clear to me about SDR THANKS
👍THANX INTERESTED IN CAPTURING EAVESDROPPERS/ELECTRONIC HARASSERS AND THIER TECHNOLOGIES ANY SUGGESTIONS FOR A FIRST TIME SETUP FOR A FIRST TIMER ?👍
Note at 10:00 I'm wrong about the mode. HF FAX is very often in upper sideband, especially with these strong US weather broadcasts.
HF FAX is in FM isnt it?
@@keithglimmer4505 Yes, but in the audio component only. The radio transmission itself is single sideband AM but the information is carried by a shifting tone that determines the brightness of the plot, and there is of course a sync pulse to keep things plotting straight. It's hard to tell by listening that it is FM encoded since most transmissions are simple black/white, but if you ever get a grayscale image coming in such as a weather satellite photo, you can clearly hear the wavering tone, just as in the NOAA VHF APT transmissions.
@@NightRunner417 HF fax has no amplitude modulation. It's a frequency modulated SSB transmission. Not sure about vhf fax. I've been able to receive some cool Japanese fax stations from my location in the central U S. I've always wanted to copy JJY which still transmits news in Japanese and English but they are a tough catch. I've copied it from a few remote sdr's but never direct.
this info is mindblowing n shows u how eazy it is 4 anyone to harass or terrorise people all illegal more please
This info is mindblowing n shows u how desperately paranoid this world has become about the most harmless of things. I'm pretty sure no one is going to harass or terrorize anyone by listening to *public* airwaves with an SDR, especially the mostly dead HF portion of the radio spectrum.
Am just getting aquianted with SDR. I am close to working on decoding a signal. Just getting my feet wet.
If you want something insanely fun to try and yet also surprisingly challenging yet easy for even the cheap SDRs, try out decoding NOAA sats on 137 MHz. You can take it as far as you want to go, even making specialized quadrifilar helix antennas to get max clarity. They broadcast a scanline image of whatever is below them, mapping the entire Earth twice a day. Cool part is that you always get your own area as the sat passes over, and also you get to hear the doppler shift in the signal from the insane velocity of the satellite in motion toward then away from you.
Thank you for this video much needed to prove where the signal is coming from for court. They have junkies blasting an RF frequency at my house and head.
Ok, gonna need you to tell us more about this.
Could i pick up rf signals from a hidden device planted in my car ?
For that purpose I'd get one that has the highest receive frequency you can get since it is not known how high the suspected bug frequency operates on...
This is really awesome! I got the RTL SDR 30$ kit with the little antenna kit, is that what you have here?
I just got the RTL-SDR Blog V.3 days ago. I have been a radio nut for years I can't believe I didn't know about these till a couple months ago. It's almost but not quite(too many images) as good as my $400 HF receiver and $400 digital scanner in one. I just wish I has just got the $20 dongle and used the extra $10 for a couple of adapters for my outside sky loop and scanner antennas.
What does is it matter when your home to show us the gear
Hi, what software r u using with the SDR dongle?
Hi enjoyed your video what rtl do you use is it a cheap dongle, at the moment I have only a few stations on the fm band.
Dave
Thanks, Dave. I've used a few of the cheap Nooelec RTLSDR dongles, which aren't terrible at for VHF and up but suck balls for HF, so you need to use a converter like HamItUp to get HF. When you do that, they are truly passable for HF use. I'm an HF enthusiast from way back, so I wasn't satisfied and ended up getting an SDRPlay RSP and then the SDRPlay RSP2 when it came out. I won't tell you that they are total showstoppers, but they are quite good on all the bands. One drawback is that support isn't as good for the SDRPlay, so you have less options, but that really only applies to more advanced uses. It'll get better, I'm sure, and maybe it already is because I haven't even looked in a long time. The SDRPlay RSP uses SDRUno by default, which is actually a great little SDR program with a lot of options and great performance. You can also force it to use the other popular programs if you hunt around for drivers. I like it, a lot, but you have to be serious because they are pricey.
Were I you, I'd get myself a discone antenna and stick it in your attic if you can. They perform really well on all things above HF. For HF, I put a huge single turn loop of wire across my ceiling in the living room and fed it into a 1:4 current balun. Works great on HF, far better than the discone or a simple wire or dipole antenna indoors. An outdoor giant loop would be the best for HF but not many people can manage it.
WOR is a radio beacon
Hi when I run DSD with HDSdR I change my sound card to VAC1 I can decode DMR but I cannot listen to analog signals without changing the sound card setting back to the speakers how can I change this so I can hear all signals please
Oh it's been too long since I was doing it to remember exactly how... but I had this crazy way of hopping the connections around so that I got it to where I could listen and decode at the same time. I'm not even set up for it now but if I come back around to it and I can reteach myself how to do it, I'll post it.
Are u running the dsd+ via app or cmd
Steve Ambrose also do u have vbcable_driver?
What programming language was it made in?:
HDSDR? C++ I would assume but I wouldn't know.
@@NightRunner417 Thanks for the return. Could you tell me where I can get the source code for it?
@@vicentecamilo5636 This bit of sad news from the website:
Q: Where can I download the source code for HDSDR?
A: Source code for HDSDR is not available. HDSDR is not ‘Open Source’, and is licensed as ‘Freeware’;.
However, Alberto di Bene did release the source code for Winrad v1.32 as public domain software.
I have one of these: @t I can receive FM stations in 88-108 Mhz range with good sound. When I switch to direct sampling and with long aerial into HF socket I can see many good strong signals in MW and HF bands. But when I tune in to the signal peaks I never get any audio. Maybe just a hum at best. I try all demodulation settings. Any thoughts?
What model of SDR are you using? If it's not built for HF and MW, then you may only be picking up interference lines which of course will almost always sound very electrical, harsh rasps and buzzings. You can still do lower frequency bands even with the cheapie SDR sticks but you'll need an upconverter, and they do work really well.
Also, bear in mind that if you're doing longwire antennae indoors, you're going to get A LOT of electrical and appliance interference. MW and HF only really get good when you get out of the house. I threw a typical scanner discone antenna literally on top of the sheet metal of my porch roof (it's really just standing there on it's ground cone, lol) and I get decent HF out of it. Sure it could be better but it's practically invisible and a huge upgrade from when I had it shoved into my attic, and the only indoor antenna I ever had or built that could beat it was my ceiling mounted magnetic loop, which was a big pain in the ass due to the very narrow bandwidth.
@@NightRunner417 thanks for the reply . I have one of these: www.qsl.net/pa2ohh/19rtlsdrlop.htm . There are big signal peaks appearing in HF band but I can't demodulate them to audio , tried LSB USB etc
@@ThinFreddysFlop Ok, so I had a look and I _think_ what you have is R820 based , which serves as the basis for all the common USB stick type SDR dongles. I don't have experience with yours specifically, but I've had three of the RTL-SDR sticks and did quite a bit with them before getting a Ham-It-Up upconverter for HF (which works really well, actually) and ultimately an SDRPlay RSP 1 and then an RSP 2 Pro. You might at this point be asking yourself "But NightRunner! You already had THREE R820 sticks and a Ham It Up! Whyever did you need two SDRPlay units??" Well that would be mainly because when I attached a long wire directly to the sampling inputs of the R820 sticks, the results were _pathetic_ at best. Like you, I got strong lines of crap in the waterfall, almost all of which were electrical interference, and only one or two of the very high power HF radio broadcasting stations. No weak stuff like amateur radio or wefax or anything like that. The Ham It Up made them HF capable just fine, but then I had to have two devices going and ultimately the Ham It Up died, one of the sticks died later, and another broke, and at that point I was just over it and wanted something a little more pro that could do it all on just one USB device.
Remember, just like I mentioned in the video, real signals will show a distinctive pattern when zoomed in on, so you can tell they're a signal even before you hear them. Interference will look like solid or fuzzy lines, will probably drift back and forth a bit, and will almost always show no discernable pattern. You can see exactly that in my video's thumbnail - regularly spaced lines of interference. Setting your SDR to one of these will only produce a hum or buzz, no matter what demodulation you choose, just like you're experiencing. I don't want to sound mean but I think you simply need a better setup. Try for a better antenna FIRST, since you already have SDR hardware you're testing out, and THEN if you still can't get anywhere, consider getting one of the more expensive SDRs that use designs other than R820. AirSpy, HackRF, LimeSDR, SDRPlay, stuff like those. Just make sure you do your homework before putting down the money, to make sure it's going to be good for what you want to do. Also bear in mind, these things are FIDDLY. All of them can be a pain in the ass, because we SDR people are a fringe tech community and support therefore is bullshit at best, lol. Can't tell you how many times I swore I hated the company that makes the SDRPlay units. They're great radios when everything's working right, but man when it isn't they'll for sure make you wanna scream.
@@NightRunner417 Many thanlNight runner, you've described what I have concluded. I got some MW stations using my TV aerial. I'm going to build an active antenna, Should be a big step forward.
@@ThinFreddysFlop If you want a fun project, try out magnetic loop antennas. You make a loop of wire about uhhhhhh 6' in diameter, open with a two inch gap at one side. Solder a common tuning capacitor across that gap so now it's essentially a tank circuit. At the opposite side, solder the cable shield directly to the wire loop. Run about a foot of wire from the center conductor to a spot about a foot up from that shield connection point, and form it into a flattened loop that follows the shape of the big loop like this:
i.pinimg.com/originals/a0/b1/ef/a0b1ef16cfa398f6747008047c808639.jpg
The capacitance determines what frequency it resonates at, with a bandwidth of no more than 500khz typically. They're tricky to tune but highly directional and extremely sensitive, being resonant and all. I built one on a huge PVC pipe cross affair using 1/2" copper waterline for the loop. It's a big awkward pain in the ass but great for say 5MHz to 15MHz and works really well indoors where signals have to penetrate a lot of material.
What software is this please? Im using SDRPlay and DSD.
This one is called HDSDR. I was using it with uh... some cheap RTLSDR stick or another, probably one of the NooElec cheapies and the Ham-It-Up HF converter. Not long after I did this video, I got myself an SDRPlay (the original) and then I eventually got an SDRPlay RSP 2 Pro. Since then, I've been using either SDRUno or SDR Radio Console, depending on my mood and my mission. They're both quite good, but I find that SDRUno is a bit easier on CPU while SDR Radio Console is more CPU hungry but has some really nice features that SDRUno does not.
You can make HDSDR work with the SDRPlay units, but the only real reason I can see to go there would be if you just gotta have your interface look like a ham rig, lol.
For some real power mad SDR-ing, try setting up a bunch of simultaneous channels in SDR Radio Console. You can actually listen to a bunch of frequencies AT THE SAME TIME, even put some on the left audio channel and some on the right. Makes one feel sort of God-like... or at least NSA or CIA like.
Ten people were like "THAT'S NOT SDR#!" lol.
is ALIENS!!!!!!!! joking :D keep up the good work , came across this , i have been a little interested in sdr for around a year now :D
What is the software?
18hours now, nothing. I used to write. Mainframe startup manuals for dummies. Check and recheck couldn't name.
How to get upto 6 GHz using just from 1 MHz to 3.2 GHz sdr usb.
The only way would be a downconverter... either that or a higher end SDR unit like the uhhhh what'sit... HackRF? I haven't looked into anything higher performance _(*more expensive*)_ than the SDRPlay because dude... my hobbies are gonna kill me as it is... so my experience in higher demand areas is pretty limited.
where can i buy all that hardware and software please net me know
james jakub Amazon. Software is mostly free
Mine has been super bad. My sinuses. Lol
Oh I am so right with you there. I have not the words.
'allergies'
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The UA-cam Algorithm®just don't get it.
How would you pick up a bluetooth headset serial number neuro sky headset. Ctt program Skype and. Afew everything y9 m9nt9rn6he human body
>human body
*FBI OPEN UP*
Us aliens use these
You guys owe me pizza and beer. Remember? Supposed to get together the night of the last full lunar eclipse and y'all sorta kinda *stood me up?* Ringin' any bells with y'all? Uh huh, that's what I thought.