PCB boards that combine these two chips can be found cheaply on Aliexpress as LoRa boards, under the name "LILYGO LoRa 32". If you are unaware, ESP32 chips cheaply combine a WiFi and Bluetooth modem with a microcontroller that is capable of hosting a webserver. CC1101 and SC127X are low cost low power hardware transceiver chips made for IOT devices. We've posted about LILYGO boards in the past as they've been used with interesting projects such as Meshtastic, and for weather balloon tracking.
This project could be useful for home automation as a module has been made available for openMQTTGateway. Instead of dedicating a more powerful Raspberry Pi and RTL-SDR, you can now dedicate a much cheaper and much lower power device to the task.
Over on YouTube @dereksgc has been putting together a comprehensive video series on weather, amateur and other satellite reception. His series starts with receiving images from NOAA APT satellites, then Meteor M2, as then goes on to talk about low cost V-Dipole satellite antennas, how satellite dishes work, and recently how to use Ku-band LNBs with a satellite dish.
If you're getting started with RTL-SDR and satellite reception, this video series may be a good introduction for you.
Downloading images directly from weather satellites || Satellite reception pt.1
At last years F-Con Jim Gatwood presented a talk titled "SDR Radio for Hackers and Nosy Nellies". The two hour talk has recently been uploaded to YouTube and covers the basics of software defined radio theory, RTL-SDRs and their installation, use of common software, GNU Radio basics, and a broad overview of various other applications including rtl_433, ADS-B and more.
If you're looking for a broad overview of the software defined radio field, and what you can do with SDRs then this may be an interesting talk for you.
Thank you to Joe NE2Z for sharing his Linux distribution called SIGpi. SIGpi is an installable Linux distribution for Ubuntu and Raspberry Pi 3/4 that focuses on providing multiple open source SDR programs that can be used for signal intelligence. Support for RTL-SDR and other SDRs is included.
The distro is actually created via a bash script that installs all the programs automatically on a fresh OS install. It also provides a system for easily upgrading software as developers work on them.
SIGpi is a "go-kit" for Signal Intelligence (SIGINT) enthusiasts with emphasis on capabilities in the VHF, UHF, and SHF spectrum. For completeness, HF spectrum related software is included for optional install. This (bash) shell script builds SIGINT tools on the following platforms:
Raspberry Pi4 4GB RAM or Raspberry Pi 400 with 32GB microSD card running Raspberry Pi OS Full (64-bit)
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS on arm64 and amd64
A headless server only install (Node Install) can be performed on Raspberry Pi3 B+ with 32GB microSD card running Raspberry Pi OS Full (64-bit)
Just a quick note to say that our RTL-SDR Blog V3 with Dipole Antenna Set is now back in stock at Amazon USA! This set includes the new black dongle enclosure design.
The RTL-SDR Blog V3 dongle by itself is also in stock at Amazon USA in both the older silver and newer black design.
Pricing remains the same as usual, $29.95 for the dongle by itself, and $39.95 for the dongle + antenna kit. We are doing our best to hold inflation costs down and keep the same pricing, but we can't guarantee that these prices won't need to increase later in the year.
The new RTL-SDR Blog V3 dongle design.
Regarding the new black design, we are currently in the process of transitioning our silver enclosures over to the newer black enclosures. The reason is mostly for regulatory compliance reasons. We're required to have a clearly printed FCC compliance statement on the product. In order to get clear small font text we have to laser etch the text, but laser etching only shows up on dark surfaces. Most black surface coatings tend to be electrically insulating, however we wanted to assure customers that we have managed to find a black plating process that retains the excellent conductivity of the bare silver. Keeping the enclosure electrically conductive ensures excellent shielding of the PCB.
Secondly the black design with our branded logo clearly displayed will help set us apart from the fake products that have now copied our silver enclosure design almost exactly. Those clones generally have a poor quality RTL-SDR dongle circuit inside, but are made to look like our official dongles in order to mislead customers. The clearer branding will also give us more authority to take down listings of any fake dongles that copy our branding in the future.
Note that there are no changes to the circuit design, this is purely a cosmetic change.
As a second note, we wanted to inform potential customers that it is currently the Chinese New Year holidays, which means that our Chinese warehouse that we use for international shipping will be closed until Feb 1st. This only affects orders directly from our international webstore, eBay or Aliexpress. It does not affect orders from Amazon USA.
We expect our international store to transition over to the black dongles around February as well.
Thanks to all our customers and blog readers for your support over the years! We have a few new exciting products currently being prototyped, so if you are not already, please remember to follow us on Twitter and/or Facebook for product updates, as well as for our weekly blog posts.
SDRangel is a free open source software defined radio program that is compatible with many SDRs, including RTL-SDRs. SDRAngel is set apart from other programs because of it's huge swath of built in demodulators and decoders.
Thank you to reader Jon for writing in and noting that SDRangel has recently been released for Android as a free Google Play download. This is an amazing development that could open up many doors into portable decoding setups as the Android version supports almost every decoder implemented on the desktop version. Jon writes:
It includes most of the functionality of the desktop version of SDRangel, including:
AM, FM, SSB, Broadcast FM and DAB, AIS, ADS-B, Digital Voice (DMR, dPMR, D-Star, FreeDV), Video (DVB-S, DVB-S2, NTSC, PAL), VOR, LoRa, M17, Packet (AX.25), Pager (POCSAG), Radiosonde (RS41), Time signal (MSF, DCF77, TDF and WWVB) modems.
RTL SDR, Airspy, Airspy HF, LimeSDR, HackRF and SDRplay support via USB OTG as well as networked SDRs
2D and 3D signal analysis in both time and frequency domain with statistical measurements of SNR, THD, THD+N, SINAD, SFDR and channel power
Satellite tracker, star tracker, maps and rotator controller
It should work on Android 6 and up. It’s a straight port of the desktop application, so although it will run on a phone, probably best used on a large tablet with a stylus or mouse.
In his latest YouTube video Matt from Tech Minds shows how to build extremely low cost antennas out of copper tape. Rolls of copper tape are commonly found very cheaply in garden stores as slug barrier tape as garden slugs will not travel over copper.
After using a dipole calculator Matt solders coax to two strips of copper tape, resulting in a rudimentary dipole (without balun or choke). His first test with a UHF sized dipole showed poor SWR and yielded poor results on an actual radio/SDR. But his second test with a VHF sized dipole actually yielded decent results.
SDR# is a popular software defined radio program that is compatible with RTL-SDR, Airspy and several other SDR devices. One feature is the ability for third parties to develop plugins for the software.
One recently released plugin that is gaining popularity is the "ListenInfo" plugin. The ListenInfo plugin uses a publicly available database of shortwave stations to display frequency station info for the LW, MW, SW bands within the SDR# spectrum display.
If you've ever been browsing the shortwave bands and wondered where a station is broadcasting from, and what it's transit power, beam direction and transmit schedule are like, then this will be a very useful plugin for you.
