Tagged: linux

Transmitting DVBT HDTV from a Raspberry Pi to an RTL2832U

Over on his blog, OZ9AEC has uploaded a post showing how he was able to create a live HDTV transmitter out of a Raspberry Pi, a Raspi Cam module and a UTC DVB-T Modulator adaptor. As he does not want to interfere with commercial DVB-T broadcasts, he sets the module to transmit at 1.28 GHz, aka the 23 cm licenced ham radio band.

On the RTL2832U dongle side, he modified the RTL2832U Linux DVB-T drivers (not the SDR drivers) to work on the 1.3 GHz band. The intention of this camera is for it to fly on a rocket mission. In the YouTube video below he has uploaded some sample footage with the RTL2832U dongle receiving the stream from 300 meters away.

Rocketcam 1 test 3 (20140531_142625)

Native RTL-SDR Support Coming to Linux

Linux will soon contain native support for software defined radio devices like the RTL2832U RTL-SDR. These new drivers written by Video4Linux developer Antii Palosaari should be included in the next Linux kernel version 3.15. Antii Palosaari was one of the first people to discover the SDR capabilities of the RTL2832U. In the image below Antii shows SDR# running in Linux with Mono with the Video4Linux gain control screen brought up.

Video4Linux Gain Controls and SDR#
Video4Linux Gain Controls and SDR#

Demonstrating GQRX Running on a BeagleBone Black with RTL-SDR

YouTube user Brad Bowers has posted a video showing GQRX running on his BeagleBone Black with an RTL-SDR dongle. The BeagleBone Black is an embedded Linux computer, similar to the Raspberry Pi, but with significantly more processing power. He found that GQRX actually performed quite responsively on the BeagleBone.

Beagle Bone Black as Rtl-SDR front end with gqrx

RTL-SDR on the Nokia N900

Over on the maemo.org forums, user xes has written a post explaining how to get the RTL-SDR working on the Nokia N900 mobile phone. The Nokia N900 runs a modified version of Linux known as maemo, and so is able to use the RTL-SDR drivers with some modifications. Attached to the post by xes are the N900 compatible RTL-SDR drivers, GNU Radio 3.6.2, GQRX and also MultimonNG.

Nokia N900 running RTL-SDR

Improved SDR Support for Kali Linux

The blog at needsec.com brings us news that Kali Linux is soon to be updated to version 1.0.5 which will come with several software defined radio tools preinstalled. Kali is a Debian Linux based operating system that is popular with the security and penetration testing community as it comes with several relevant tools preinstalled. This new version adds several useful SDR software programs including

  • Kalibrate for RTLSDR
  • gr-air-modes
  • RTLSDR Scanner
  • pyrtlsdr
  • GNU Radio Signal Scanner
  • libosmocore 0.6.3
  • grextras
  • gr-baz
  • gr-osmosdr
  • gr-iqbal
  • rtl-sdr 0.5.0
  • HackRF for SDR
  • gr-fcdproplus for SDR
  • UHD Images

via needsec.com

Update: Official Release now out

kali-site-logo2

RTL-SDR Running on an Aria G25

Blogger and ham radio enthusiast F4GKR has written a brief tutorial post on his blog showing how he got an RTL-SDR working with an Aria G25, and in another post some benchmarking results. The Aria G25 is a very small low cost, Linux capable embedded computer, similar to the Raspberry Pi.

He was able to get rtl_tcp running with a 2 MSps sampling rate and found it used about 60% of the CPU.

Aria G25 running the RTL-SDR

New (Work In Progress) WebRadio Software for the RTL-SDR Released

Mike Stirling has just released a still in-development version of his Linux based WebRadio software, which supports the RTL-SDR. WebRadio allows someone to connect to a remote RTL-SDR device via a web interface over the internet, much like WebSDR.

There is an installation guide here.

WebRadio

I was able to compile, install and run the software, but there were a few issues that required resolving.

Continue reading →

RTL_ACARS Console Acars Decoder for RTL-SDR

On the Osmocom mailing list, Andreas has posted his work on a console based ACARS decoder for the RTL-SDR. Check out the mailing list thread here, and original post here. The second post on the thread shows how to compile it under Linux. Andreas writes

I have combined “rtl_fm” with Thierry Leconte’s (GPL’ed) acarsdec library code and created “rtl_acars” which can directly decode ACARS flight info messages to the console. Confirmed to compile on OSX 10.6 (not possible for me to check if it also compiles under Windows and *nix). Feel free to add it as another proof of concept to your distro unless you consider it too much of a quick&dirty hack.

Only the source code is available, and you will need to compile it yourself. The code can be found here.