Tagged: rtl-sdr

A More In-depth Look at the Tunisian RTL-SDR Espionage Story

The Africa Report, an online newspaper specializing in African stories recently ran a story titled "A Tunisian spy story". The story discusses the circumstances behind the mysterious arrest of a UN expert in Tunisian, supposedly for having used an RTL-SDR dongle as part of his research into violations of the UN arms embargo on Libya. See our previous post for the original details.

The Africa Report story gives a more in depth look at what happened during his arrest and what is happening in Tunisia. If you're interested in following this story, this is a good read.

An RTL-SDR aircraft tracker, which can be purchased legally on the internet, is composed of an antenna and a USB key. There are smartphone apps that have similar functionalities that allow you to track commercial flight routes. Can it be that this object, found in his home, is the sole piece of evidence used by the Tunisian courts to justify the detention of United Nations (UN) expert Moncef Kartas for espionage, as his defence claims?

Kartas, who is German-Tunisian, was officially mandated in 2016 by the UN to lead an investigation into violations of the arms embargo on Libya. His carefully selected team was appointed by the UN secretary general and were due to draft a report in June. Kartas’s arrest disrupted those plans.

Kartas was arrested as he walked off a plane on 11 April in a theatrical scene at Tunis airport involving around 10 security agents. He is now awaiting trial in his cell in Mornaguia prison. Accused of “treason” and “spying for a foreign power”, he faces the death penalty. Fortunately for him, Tunisia has banned that punishment.

Rumours are running high around the activities of a security company he co-founded and the role of a second man who was also arrested. But several pieces are missing from the puzzle. The versions of the Tunisian authorities and the UN are completely different, as is the information supplied by the defence and that supplied by the prosecution. Saying it is “very concerned”, the UN is calling for the researcher’s release, pointing out that the lifting of his immunity is illegal.

[Read More]

UPDATE: Kartas was recently freed on bail.

SignalsEverywhere: P25 Trunking with Just One RTL-SDR and DSDPlus Fastlane

Over on YouTube Corrosive from the SignalsEverywhere channel has uploaded a new video showing us how to set up P25 trunking and decoding with DSDPlus Fastlane and only a single RTL-SDR.

Normally two dongles are required to follow a P25 trunking system. One dongle continuously receives the trunking channel, and a second tunes to the voice channel chosen by the trunking channel. However, the latest DSDPlus Fastlane has a feature that allows one only dongle to be used. It works by tuning back and forth between the control and voice channel. The disadvantage is that trunking information could be missed while tuned to a voice channel, so some calls could be missed.

RTL SDR Setup P25 Trunking With 1 SDR and DSDPlus FastLane

Osmocom Now Releasing Weekly Windows Binaries for RTL-SDR and Osmo-FL2K

Osmocom is the open source team behind the RTL-SDR driver project and the Osmo-FL2K discovery. In a recent announcement they have noted that they are now publishing weekly binary builds for the RTL-SDR and Osmo-FL2K projects. This means that Windows users are now able to test the latest driver updates without having to compile them manually. Laforge writes:

While Osmocom in general is a very much Linux-centric development community, we are now finally publishing automatic weekly Windows binary builds for the most widely used Osmocom SDR related projects: rtl-sdr and osmo-fl2k.

You can find the binaries at The actual builds are done by roox who is building them using MinGW on OBS, see

The status of the osmocom binary publish job, executed once per week from now on, can be found at https://jenkins.osmocom.org/jenkins/view/All%20no%20Gerrit/job/Osmocom-OBS_MinGW_weekly_publish/

As a reminder, if you've ever enjoyed the RTL-SDR or Osmo-FL2k projects, you can thank Osmocom for bringing them to us for free by donating to them at Open Collective. The drivers are the root of all that we can do with RTL-SDR and FL2K, so it is only fair to thank them.

Vela Pulsar Glitch Detected with RTL-SDR Based Radio Telescope

On February 1st 2019 the HawkRAO amateur radio telescope detected a "glitch" during it's observations of the Vela Pulsar. A pulsar is a rotating neutron star that emits a beam of electromagnetic radiation. If this beam points towards the earth, it can then be observed with a large dish or directional antenna and a radio, like the RTL-SDR. The Vela pulsar is the strongest one in our sky, making it one of the easiest for amateur radio astronomers to receive.

Pulsars are known to have very accurate rotational periods which can be measured by the radio pulse period. However, every now and then some pulsars can "glitch", resulting in the rotational period suddenly increasing. Glitches can't be predicted, but Vela is one of the most commonly observed glitching pulsars.

The HawkRAO amateur radio telescope run by Steve Olney is based in NSW, Australia and consists of a 2 x 2 array of 42-element cross Yagi antennas. The antennas feed into three LNAs and then an RTL-SDR radio receiver. He has been observing the Vela pulsar for 20 months.

His observations indicate that Vela glitched and spun up by 2.5PPM at 14:09 UTC on Feb 1, 2019. He claims that this glitch detection is a first for amateur radio astronomy as far as he is aware.

If you're interested in Pulsar detection, check out a few of our previous posts on the topic.

The HawkRAO Amateur Radio Telescope Vela Glitch Detection
The HawkRAO Amateur Radio Telescope Vela Glitch Detection (Blue graph on the right indicates the glitch detection)

Decoding Es’Hail-2 DVB-S2 Realtime in Linux with LeanDVB

Last week we posted about M Khanfar's YouTube video that showed how to decode Es'Hail-2/QO-100 DVB-S2 on Ubuntu with the LeanDVB decoder. However, the method he showed was not in real time as it involved recording an IQ file in GQRX first, then decoding that IQ file. Similarly we also posted last week about a Windows based real time decoder.

M Khanfar recently wrote in again and wanted to show that real time decoding is possible with LeanDVB. The method is to simply pipe the output of the rtl_sdr command line decoder in LeanDVB, and then into VLC. He notes that his PC isn't actually fast enough to decode in real time without lag, but a modern i5 CPU would work well. The actual terminal command is shown in his YouTube video description.

This is Realtime live DVB-S2 Decoding done , without need to record .RAW file , its live and easy method by one click ! In this video i decoding 2MS symbol rate from wideband transponder of QO-100 beacon , you can decoding 1MS , 0.5MS , 333KS , 125KS symbol rate ! The lower Symbol, the faster speed for decoding! , the Amateurs operators on QO-100 Uplink DATV DVB-S2 at 0.5 , 333 , 125Ks , so its easy to Live Decoding Now ! With very low SNR ! , so the normal SDR can coverage wideband beacon of 2Ms symbol and all Ham uplink ! , if you have an SDR that can coverage 27.5 mb of bandwidth, so you can easy decoding Live a standard commercial satellite channels! But it need a high speed Pc .

QO-100 Realtime Live DVB-S2 Decoding

RSGB Talk – The Farnham WebSDR: DC to Microwaves on your Smartphone

Over on YouTube the Radio Society of Great Britain (RSGB) has uploaded a talk by Noel Matthews (G8GTZ) titled "The Farnham WebSDR: DC to Microwaves on your smartphone". The Farnham WebSDR runs 8 (soon to be 10) RTL-SDR dongles in order to cover multiple bands from DC to 2 GHz.

If you're interested in their talks, the RSGB also recently uploaded several other amateur radio related talks from their 2018 convention to their YouTube channel.

This presentation gives an overview of the Farnham WebSDR (http://farnham-sdr.com/) which currently covers the LF bands through to 10GHz. The presentation describes the system architecture and antennas currently used on each band and how the team has used RTL dongle receivers, available for under £10, to give good RF performance on all bands from DC to 10GHz. There is a demonstration of the SDR in use on both PC and smartphone.

RSGB 2018 Convention lecture - The Farnham WebSDR: DC to Microwaves on your smartphone

RTLion: The Multipurpose RTL-SDR Framework

Redditor [K3PWN] has recently released his project called “RTLion”. RTLion is a software framework for RTL-SDR dongles that currently supports various features such as a power spectrum plot and frequency scanning. The software can run on a Raspberry Pi 3 and all features are intended to be accessed via an easy to use web browser interface, or via an Android app. The software can also be run with Docker, making it useful for IoT applications.

RTLion project can be described as a framework due to the implementation of various features other than the frequency scanner. The common structure of the project is appropriate for adding new features too. RTLion Framework has a Flask–SocketIO based Web interface which houses it’s features there. Web interface preferred to the command line interface for facilitating the usage and supporting remote operations. Matplotlib used for creating graphs, more specifically pylabpsd(Power Spectral Density) method mostly used for converting the complex samples (stored in a numpy array) to FFT graphs.

Main purpose of the RTLion Framework is creating a framework for RTL2832 based DVB-T receivers and supporting various features such as spectral density visualizing and frequency scanning remotely. These features are provided on the Web interface and accessible via the RTLion server or the RTLion Android App for RTL-SDR & IoT applications.

RTLion - IoT RTL-SDR

All of his code is open source and available on Github. Currently he’s looking for feedback on improving the framework and we are interested to see where this project may lead in the future.

SignalsEverywhere Podcast: Is Software Defined Radio Illegal?

Corrosive from the SignalsEverywhere YouTube channel has released a new episode of his podcast, this time discussing the topic "Is Software Defined Radio Illegal?". Recently we posted about the unfortunate arrest of a UN investigator in Tunisia. Reports from news agencies seem to indicate that a major factor in his arrest was his use of an RTL-SDR dongle for monitoring air traffic as part of his investigation on Libya arms embargo violations. Although it is suspected that other political motivations are at play.

In his podcast Corrosive tries to open a discussion on whether software defined radio (SDR) is illegal, since SDR receivers have the possibility to be able to receive, demodulate and decode almost any signal. He first focuses on mostly American FCC laws regarding scanners, but similar laws are likely to be in place throughout most of the western world. Later in the podcast he discusses transmit capable SDRs and how these are more likely to come to the attention of politicians.