Any SDR interest at VHS ARC?

VHS ARC
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I don’t know if any of the VHS ARC folks are into software defined radio (SDR) but this blog post caught my attention:

http://greatscottgadgets.com/2016/03-08-free-stuff-april-2015/

… and also this related page:

http://greatscottgadgets.com/freestuff/

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I’ve spent quite a few hours scrubbing through whatever I can pickup on my RTL-SDR. I could often pickup the radio chatter at the train yards, which was fun to listen on. Sometimes I could pickup the odd ADS broadcast for plane spotting. I found that the Jehova Witnesses owned channels (there are quite a few, see CRTC website) are always spewing out a carrier (but could never figure out if there was any information in it…)

A transmit capable SDR would be quite fun I imagine. They’ve always been a bit cost prohibitive for me though.

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I’ve played with my RTL-SDR a bit. The dollar-to-learning value is incredible.
I’ve recorded and played with keyfobs signals, and whatever I can tune into at home.

When I travel, I like to bring it with me to listen to the airplane signals. You can either listen to the tower calls, or tap into the avionics data reporting, and see some neat info.

I’ve always wanted to get my hands on a hackRF One to play with something a little higher quality.

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I haven’t but am really interested!

VE7PXG

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I’ve sent a request to Great Scott Gadgets to see if they would donate a HackRF One to VHS.

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Thanks for that Luke!

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I have the RTL-SDR dongle (think I got it at RP a few years back) but not really sure the best way to run it…
Anyone with experience interested in meeting up at the Space to go over it??

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Yeah, I have mine and we’ve played with it at the ARC Ham radio course. So far I’ve just been using SDR# (which is pretty good, but limited features)

I really want to move forward with GNU-Radio and get some decoding going. I’d really enjoy playing around and at the very least showing how to listen with SDR#

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My ideal SDR-related plan for VHS would be:

  • Put an antenna on the roof
  • Connect it to our SDR, connected to a computer in the rack
  • Allow members (with Amateur licenses) to use it by remotely logging into the computer

PSK31 on the 20-meter band would be fun. AFAIK it requires only a simple random wire antenna and can reach fantastic distances. And since PSK13 is a digital text protocol, it would be conducive to using within a remote SSH session.

If we have multiple SDRs available, we can run multiple antennas for multiple purposes.

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Did you use the tiny antenna it came with or try something better?

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I wonder if this would be something that would integrate well with Nomos, if someone felt that was an itch they wanted to scratch.

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Just the tiny one so far. Been wanting to play with a better SDR to do more and attach a better antenna. I don’t have any micro-sma connectors :slight_smile: