Amateur radio, space technology and other geeky stuff by Alexandru Csete
Articles and blogs about radio receivers and transmitters. Both commercial off the shelf radios and home made DIY experiments by Alexandru Csete OZ9AEC.
I just noticed today that the latest release of Qthid is available as Debian packages for Debian wheezy (testing) and sid (unstable). As a bonus it contains both Qthid 3.1 and 2.2 so you can easily upgrade the firmware of your brand new Funcube Dongle. It also contains all the necessary setup files and procedures … Read more
Last week I have tested the RTL2832U-based ezcap EzTV666 DVB-T dongle on the air using various VHF signal.
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 dongle, which is based on the RTL2832U chip, can be used to stream raw I/Q samples to the host computer. It is in fact the way the device supports FM and DAB reception; raw I/Q is sent to the host where the application does the demodulation.
Just a quick note that Gqrx now uses pulseaudio for all audio I/O, which includes I/Q input from the Funcube Dongle.
I am happy to inform all users of the Funcube Dongle and GNU Radio, that the gr-fcd driver is now included in the GNU Radio source tree. You can read the announcement here. This change will be available in the next GNU Radio release, which I think will be 3.5.3, however, if you pull the … 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 them to a WAV file, and finally decode the images using the free and open source Atpdec decoder. If you follow this guide you can end up with very nice results such as the one shown at the end.
The Qthid Funcube Dongle controller version 3.1 has now been released. This release includes the necessary fixes to make qthid work on Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. Thanks to Mike KØZAP for the patch!
Few weeks ago, or maybe a month or two – I don’t remember, I spent an afternoon trying to build gnuradio-core and gr-audio on Mac OS X without using any macports. It was a casual an undocumented attempt that resulted in a compilation failure. I wasn’t surprised because I made several mistakes along the way, so I just left it an moved on.
FM traffic and packet radio from the AO-27 amateur radio satellite. I made this recording last Saturday while testing the Gqrx software receiver using the cross yagis at OZ7SAT and the Funcube Dongle.
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.