Amateur radio, space technology and other geeky stuff by Alexandru Csete
For some time now I have been in great need of small and cheap AIS receivers that could be used for guiding various tracking equipment during Copenhagen Suborbitals missions. AIS stands for Automatic Identification System and is used by maritime vessels for reporting various status, including position, heading and speed.
Take a Beaglebone, add an LCD cape and a £10 USB TV dongle, install librtlsdr and my rtlizer software and you have an awesome hand-held, real-time spectrum analyzer.
I was testing the Gqrx FM stereo code by Alex Grinkov using an RTL-SDR dongle when I noticed that the recently added auto-gain in the driver can be quite useful.
Support for RTL2832U-based DVB-T dongles and USRP devices from Ettus Research is now available in the Gqrx source code repository. Support for RTL2832U-based DVB-T devices is available via the rtl-sdr and gr-osmosdr libraries. This also provides support for Ettus Research USRP’s if the gr-uhd package has been installed prior to compiling gr-osmosdr. A complete build … Read more
I got myself a Cubieboard some months ago, not because I needed one by because I had the opportunity to join a group purchase organized by some friends back then. I wasn’t looking for a new board, however, the Cubieboard looked interesting because of the onboard SATA connector. Plus the analog audio input / output … Read more
About a year ago I posted a step-by-step guide about how to receive NOAA APT weather satellite images using Gqrx SDR and the Funcube Dongle. Today, I tried to repeat the procedure using my ezcap eztv666 rtlsdr dongle with very good results.
RTL2832U-based DVB-T dongles are now supported by Gqrx SDR, see this announcement! You may have noticed the recent buzz on the internet about using cheap DVB-T dongles as software defined radio receivers. It all started on this mailing list when V4L/DVB kernel developer Antti Palosaari discovered that the ezcap EzTV 668 DVB-T/FM/DAB USB … Read more
One of the great advantages of software defined radio receivers is that tuning receiver settings is a matter of adjusting software parameters. Gqrx is no different here and has optimal settings built in for weather satellite reception. This tutorial describes how to receive automatic picture transmissions (APT) from NOAA weather satellites using Gqrx SDR, record … Read more
Please visit the new Gqrx website. The information on this page is no longer updated! Gqrx is a software defined radio receiver for Funcube Dongle (FCD), RTL2832U-based DVB-T devices (RTL-SDR), Universal Software Radio Peripherals (USRP) and Osmo SDR devices. It is powered by GNU Radio and the Qt GUI toolkit.