Category: RTL-SDR

March 11, 2016

HamRadioScience Reviews the Elad FDM-DUO Software Defined Transceiver

The Elad FDM-DUO is a high end $1149 USD Italian made software defined radio transceiver (transmit and receiver) with a frequency range of 10 kHz – 54 MHz, a 16-bit ADC, a bandwidth of up to 6 MHz and can transmit with up to 5 – 8 watts. It is a product targeted at ham radio enthusiasts who want a gradual transition into software defined radios. It can work in two modes: either as a standalone computer-less radio just like a regular hardware radio, or as a fully functional computer based SDR.

Recently the admin of hamradioscience.com rather comprehensively reviewed the Elad FDM-DUO. His thoughts are that it is the perfect radio for those wanting to be slowly eased into the SDR world due to it’s dual mode operation. He writes:

The Italian made FDM-DUO has to be the most versatile, well designed, and well thought out SDR system currently on the market.

The review by hamradioscience goes over several points such as explaining what all the connectors on the radio are for, reviewing the ergonomics, reviewing the radio in standalone mode and in PC based SDR mode and he also reviews the companion software package. The reviewer is especially impressed with the included software, basically making the point that this system is a full SDR transceiver package (all you need in terms of hardware AND software).

Generally we recommend more general purpose and lower cost wideband VHF/UHF SDR’s like the Airspy, SDRplay RSP or HackRF (see our review on those SDRs here), but if you are not limited by budget and want to use an SDR mostly for HF amateur radio purposes then the Elad FDM-DUO looks like a winner. The author concludes with the following comment.

Elad got so many things right with the FDM-DUO that it is hard find much to criticize. Unlike so many SDR systems available today, the FDM-DUO SDR system feels like less of a “science project” and more of a finished consumer product. For those who wants a SDR radio system that “just works” and easy to use, the FDM-DUO is a great choice. Also, kudos to Elad for providing such a well done SDR program. The program was very stable over the review period. No, crashing at just the wrong time say during a contest. Heck even if it did, it wouldn’t matter much since you could just continue on using the FDM-DUO as a standalone rig. With some of the larger radio manufacturers dipping their toes in the SDR area, they should take note of what Elad has done with the FDM-DUO. Elad has truly created a very flexible multi-use system with the FDM-DUO and a darn fine SDR radio system at a very good value.

FDMDuo_SW — The Elad FDM software package.

March 10, 2016

Review: FlightAware 1090 MHz ADS-B Antenna and Filter

In this post we will review the FlightAware ADS-B Antenna and their 1090 MHz band pass filter. The FlightAware ADS-B antenna is claimed to have 5.5 dBi of gain, a rugged weatherproof radome and N-type female connector. It costs $44.95 USD on Amazon for US customers and $54.95 USD on eBay for international customers (plus shipping). They write that they are selling this antenna at cost in order to improve FlightAware coverage.

The FlightAware ADS-B filter is a bandpass filter with a pass range of 980MHz - 1150MHz, ~1.5dB insertion loss and more than 40dB attenuation of unwanted frequencies. It costs $19.95 USD on Amazon for US customers and $24.99 USD on eBay for international customers (plus shipping). Generally it is much cheaper than other ADS-B filter options on the market.

FlightAware.com is a company that specializes in aggregating ADS-B data from contributors around the world. People can contribute by using the FlightAware official hardware, or with a simple SDR, like an RTL-SDR dongle. They display the data on their website as it can be used to help track flight arrival times. A similar company is flightradar24.com.

If you are interested in getting started with ADS-B reception with your RTL-SDR then we have a tutorial here.

FlightAware ADS-B Antenna

The FlightAware antenna is about 64cm in length and about 2cm in diameter. It uses an N female connector and comes included with mounting brackets and U-bolts. It is painted olive green.

In the photo below we compare the size of the antenna against a reference monopole antenna, an RTL-SDR dongle and the FlightAware ADS-B filter. The antenna appears to be very solidly built and of a high quality finish. The antenna is wareproofed with some silicon caulking used around the seams of the endcaps.

The FlightAware ADS-B antenna is a collinear type antenna. Collinear antennas are omnidirectional (receives equally from all directions) and have a higher gain compared to most other omnidirectional antennas, but their radiation pattern is flattened and directed more towards the horizon. This is a good thing for receiving planes that are far away as they will be at lower elevations, but aircraft at higher elevations relative to your antenna may be received poorer. Although, it is likely that any aircraft at high elevations to your position will be closer to you anyway, and thus have a stronger signal making the reduced gain at higher elevations less important. Judging by it's ~60cm length and it's specified gain of 5.5dBi, the FlightAware antenna is likely to be a 4 element collinear.

A 4 element collinear generally has positive gain from 0 - 20 degrees of elevation, whereas a simple dipole or ground plane may have positive gain from between 0 - 40 degrees of elevation. A typical commercial jet flys at about 10km. At a distance of 100km this jet would be at a 5.7 degree elevation, and at 10km 45 degrees. Smaller aircraft fly at about 3km maximum, and at 100km would have an elevation of 1.7 degrees, and at 10km 16.7 degrees, so the collinear covers most cases.

A reader wrote in to us to let us know that the internals of the FlightAware antenna had actually previously been posted in an old thread on their forums. From the image it looks like the antenna may be a sleeved dipole + whip + impedance matching design, or something similar. This design is somewhat of a collinear design thanks to the additional whip which also gives a flatter radiation pattern with more gain direction out towards the horizon. These antennas are omnidirectional (they receive equally from all directions) and have a higher gain compared to most other omnidirectional antennas, but their radiation pattern is flattened and directed more towards the horizon. This is a good thing for receiving planes that are far away as they will be at lower elevations, but aircraft at higher elevations relative to your antenna may be received poorer. Although, it is likely that any aircraft at high elevations to your position will be closer to you anyway, and thus have a stronger signal making the reduced gain at higher elevations less important.

If you live in a valley, or have multiple obstacles such as trees or buildings blocking your view of the horizon then the higher gain design may work worse than a dipole/quarter wave ground plane/folded monopole type antenna. In this situation you'd mainly only be able to receive ADS-B signals from higher elevations, so an antenna with a less flat radiation pattern would work better. See the end of this post for some example radiation pattern diagrams.

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March 10, 2016

Using Multiple RTL-SDR’s to Capture a Trunking System

An RTL-SDR dongle has a maximum usable bandwidth of about 2.4 MHz which most often isn’t enough to capture an entire trunking system that may be spread out over a larger bandwidth. In order to get around this limitation Luke Brendt has been using three RTL-SDR dongles together to capture a trunking system in his area which is spread over 6 MHz of bandwidth.

Luke uses his own Trunk Recorder software and writes that he has modified it to support multiple SDR’s. His software has the following description:

Trunk Recorder is able to record the calls on a trunked radio system. It uses 1 or more Software Defined Radios (SDRs) to do. The SDRs capture large swatches of RF and then use software to process what was recieved. GNURadio is used to do this processing and provides lots of convienent RF blocks that can be pieced together to do complex RF processing. Right now it can only record one Trunked System at a time.

Trunk Recorder currently supports the following:

P25 & SmartNet Trunking Systems

SDRs that use the OsmoSDR source ( HackRF, RTL – TV Dongles, BladeRF, and more)

Ettus USRP

P25 Phase 1 & Analog voice

Luke also mentions that using three RTL-SDRs like this seems to be more efficient on the CPU than using a single SDR that has 8 MHz of bandwidth due to the amount of down sampling that needs to be done on larger bandwidth SDRs.

When I was using a single SDR, each Recorder had to take in the full 8MHz and pull out the small 12.5KHz that was interesting. The end results is that I could only record about 3 channels at once before the CPU got overloaded. Since that control channel was going at the same time, that was the equivalent of about 32MHz of bandwidth to process.

With the RTL-SDR, each Recorder only has to look at 2MHz, which puts a lot lighter load on the CPU. Roughly speaking, having 3 Recorders active, plus the control channel would mean that only a total of 8MHz was being processed. As you can see, this means that it scales much more efficiently.

Using three RTL-SDR's to monitor a 6 MHz trunking system. — Using three RTL-SDR’s to monitor a 6 MHz trunking system.

March 10, 2016

Creating a wireless RTL-SDR server with a small OpenWRT WiFi Router

Over on his blog yo2ldk has been experimenting with creating a wireless RTL-SDR server by using a mini OpenWRT based WiFi router (page in Romanian, use Google Translate for English). The router he uses is the GL iNet 802.11n 150Mbps router, which is a mini WiFi router that only costs $27 USD and is about the same size as an RTL-SDR dongle. It is mainly intended for use with IoT devices, but it runs the Linux based OpenWRT firmware and has enough processing power and WiFi bandwidth to run an rtl_tcp server streaming at 2MSPS with no lag.

With an RTL-SDR connected and the router running rtl_tcp, the router can be placed anywhere there is power (yo2ldk uses a portable battery pack) to create a remote radio receiver with absolutely no coax cable losses. It’s WiFi range could be extended over long distances by using a directional Yagi antenna.

Using routers instead of mini computers like the recently released Raspberry Pi 3 may be a good option because they are very small, usually much cheaper, maybe be more power efficient, and may work better at transmitting the large amounts of data rtl_tcp requires.

In the future yo2ldk hopes to install everything into a shielded metal case, add an upconverter and also a solar panel for remote power.

YO2LDK's remote RTL-SDR set up. — YO2LDK’s remote RTL-SDR set up.

We note that if you have an old Android phone, then this could also potentially be used as a remote RTL-SDR server. To create an android RTL-SDR server simply download the Martin Marinov Android RTL2832U Driver from the Google play store. Find the IP address of your Android phone by going to Settings -> About Device -> Status -> IP Address. Then open the RTL2832U driver app and click on “Enable advanced mode (for debug & stream to PC)”. Initially the rtl_tcp string will have the code “-a 0.0.0.0”, simply change this to the IP address of your Android phone, for example “-a 192.168.1.15” and then click Start stream. Now on a remote PC connected to the same network open SDR# go to RTL-SDR (TCP) and type in the IP address of the phone and use the port number 14423. Click the play button and you should now be streaming your RTL-SDR data over WiFi.

March 8, 2016

Beta testing a modified RTL-SDR Driver for L-band heat issues

The R820T/2 RTL-SDR’s are known to have a problem that surfaces when trying to listen at L-band frequencies above about 1.5 GHz. As the dongle heats up the internal PLL appears to loose lock, causing reception to be lost above a certain frequency which is usually above around 1.5 GHz. There appears to be manufacturing variation between R820T/2 chips, so some dongles may exhibit this problem, whilst others do not, and some may fail at lower or higher frequencies than others.

This problem can be almost completely solved by cooling the RTL-SDR, and this is the reason we have added a thermal pad to the RTL-SDR dongles sold by us to aid with passive cooling via the metal case. In our tests this solves the problem for almost all dongles, but a few still do sometimes still exhibit this problem after running for a few hours.

Recently we were informed by a reader of RTL-SDR.com about a conversation on IRC where some users suggested modifying the RTL-SDR drivers to solve this problem. The suggestion was to modify the VCO current settings so that they were implemented in the same way as in the Airspy (which also uses the R820T2 but does not have this problem). Basically, in the Airspy the current is set at maximum on initialization, whereas in the RTL-SDR drivers it is set lower, and then bumped up if the PLL fails to lock. Setting it to maximum in the first place seems to help stop signal loss at L-band frequencies.

So far we’ve tested this change with a dongle that was known to be very bad at L-band. This dongle used to fail at 1.65 GHz after 20 seconds. With the driver change it fails after 2 minutes which is an improvement. With passive cooling via thermal pad and our metal case it used to fail after 15 minutes or so, but with passive cooling and the driver change it runs indefinitely.

If you’re having problems at L-band and would like to test this change then we’ve uploaded a modified Windows version of the driver on GitHub here https://github.com/rtlsdrblog/rtl-sdr/releases. It is based on Keenerds version of the RTL-SDR drivers. Simply download the .dll file and replace the current version in your SDR# folder, or other folder. Let us know if it helps you.

The main change made is r82xx_write_reg_mask(priv, 0x12, 0x00, 0xe0); is added to the init code, and r82xx_write_reg_mask(priv, 0x12, 0x80, 0xe0); r82xx_write_reg_mask(priv, 0x12, 0x60, 0xe0); are removed from the set_pll and pll check code.

Thanks to patchvonbraun, Youssef of Airspy and others on IRC for discussing this problem.

case_only — Passive cooling via thermal pad and metal case heatsinking resolves the L-band problem in most cases.

March 8, 2016

RTLSDR4Everyone: Testing the Nooelec and RTL-SDR Blog Metal Cases

Over on his blog rtlsdr4everyone, author Akos has been testing the metal cases produced by Nooelec and RTL-SDR Blog (this site!). In his post Akos compares the Nooelec aluminium enclosures for the MCX based RTL-SDR dongles and for the ham-it-up upconverter, and also our aluminium enclosure for our SMA RTL-SDR dongles.

In his post Akos discusses the pricing, size, durability, heatsinking, shielding, and various other aspects of the cases. He also does a toughness test where he runs over each case with a car – all cases pass the test.

We’d like to add that all our dongles now come with an aluminium enclosure standard, but if you have one of our older models you can upgrade to the aluminium case for $4.95 including shipping from China. Akos writes that our cases can also potentially be used with other (non-SMA) RTL-SDR dongles too with a few modifications. Also the heatsink Akos adds to the cases is probably a bit of an overkill as in our tests our metal case with thermal interface pad is enough to almost completely solve heat related issues at L-band frequencies. Adding a small additional heatsink should be sufficient if there are still problems.

Akos also adds that he has updated his review of the Balun one nine with a YouTube video showing the difference in reception between a long wire antenna with and without the balun used.

March 7, 2016

Listening to an Astronaut Transmitting from the International Space Station

Over on YouTube user surfrockuk shows a fun and educational use of the RTL-SDR. Every now and then astronauts will arrange a ham radio session where they will communicate with a school. An RTL-SDR can be used to listen in on at least the downlink (astronaut talking) portion of these transmissions.

The following video shows astronaut Tim Peake transmitting from the international space station (ISS) on Feburary 19th 2016. He was speaking to Oasis Academy in the UK. To receive the signal surfrockuk used an RTL-SDR with a QFH antenna. Many people have reported that other simple antennas such as discones, quartwave ground planes and even long wire antennas have been good enough to receive transmissions from the ISS too.

Other transmissions that can be received from the ISS include SSTV, space walk communications, and in the future DATV.

Tim Peake Transmitting from the International Space Station - 19th February 2016

Watch this video on YouTube

March 7, 2016

Building a Direction Finding System with a Frequency Mixer and SDR

David of rowetel.com has recently been working on creating a direction finding system with his HackRF. A direction finder can be used to determine which direction a radio signal is coming from and is good for detecting sources of noise, illegal transmissions, for amateur radio fox hunts or for in David’s case, tracking down a local repeater troll.

In most direction finding implementations so far people have ran two SDRs from the same clock source in order to create a phase coherent receiver. However David is using a different method and he writes:

The trick is to get signals from two antennas into the SDR, in such a way that the phase difference can be measured. One approach is to phase lock two or more SDRs. My approach is to frequency shift the a2 signal, which is then summed with a1 and sent to the SDR. I used a Minicircuits ADE-1 mixer (left) and home made hybrid combiner (centre).

David uses his HackRF to capture the signal and the free Octave numerical computation environment to compute the mathematics. In his post David explains the math behind this implementation, and shows some of his results in which he has been able to find the angle towards the transmitter in a test bench set up.

David also writes that this method could be used for offline direction finding. By logging the baseband signal whenever a transmission occurs, direction finding could be done days later and compared with several logged transmissions across town to get a cross bearing. He also writes that an offline logging system would be useful for evidence in case of prosecution of people illegally transmitting.