On Tuesday I took my Funcube Dongle to our weekly meeting at OZ7SAT for testing it on the air using some bigger antennas than my Arrow antenna. We were listening for amateur radio satellites and cubesat on the 70 cm band and we were using a standard Wimo X-yagi (8 elements I think). For SDR receiver application we used modified Quisk SDR running on Ubuntu Linux.
Radios
Articles and blogs about radio receivers and transmitters. Both commercial off the shelf radios and home made DIY experiments by Alexandru Csete OZ9AEC.
Funcube Dongle close-up photos
A few close-up photos taken yesterday of my Funcube Dongle.
Qthid 2.1 release
About a week ago I forked Howard’s qthid002 cross platform Funcube Dongle controller application with the objective of continuing development and adding support for the full FCD API that has been available since version 18f of the firmware. This first release contains various fixes for he crashes and freezes that were known to happen, providing a stable application that can be used to change frequency and upgrade the firmware from 18b to 18f.
Qthid Funcube Dongle Controller
Qthid is simple cross platform controller application for the Funcube Dongle Pro and Pro+ software defined radio receivers. It is written using the HID API library and the Qt GUI toolkit. It is a fork and evolution of the qthid002.zip package by Howard Long, G6LVB, available on the Funcube Dongle download page. Qthid is free … Read more
Funcube Dongle smoke testing
As I tweeted last Friday, I managed to get a Funcube Dongle this time! The dongles were packaged over the weekend and shipped Monday this week. I could pick up mine at the local post office earlier today. Initial smoke testing using Linux and GNU Radio has been very encouraging for further experiments.
ASCII art FFT with USRP and UHD
The Universal Hardware Driver (UHD) for the USRP contains a cool example program that can draw spectrum scope using simple ASCII art. This video shows reception of 8 MHz wide spectrum slices in the broadcast FM band 88 – 108 MHz.
ARISSat-1: Why is it cool and why do we care?
It looks like AMSAT is going to launch a new satellite! ARISSat-1 – the successor of SuitSat-1 – is ready to be launched on Progress-41P heading to the International Space Station on Friday, January 28, 2011. It will be deployed into its own orbit during EVA 27 currently scheduled for February 16. Once in orbit, it will slowly decay and eventually burn up in the Earth’ atmosphere. SuitSat-1 decayed after 7 months in orbit and that’s also a likely life time for ARISSat-1.
So, why is ARISSat-1 cool and why should we care?
Test driving Quisk SDR
Before getting my hands all dirty with adding UHD driver to Quisk, I decided to take it for a test drive using some pre-recorded samples. I have used a 250 ksps recording of the HO-68 / XW-1 linear transponder downlink that I have recorded on November 9, 2010 using the USRP and the RFX400 daughterboard.
Quisk – A software defined radio for Linux
Few days ago I learned about the Quisk software defined radio application for Linux. It is written by James Ahlstrom N2ADR with contributions from other radio amateurs around the world. A quick glance at the home page and the documentation suggested that it is a rather simple application where it is easy to add support for other hardware.
GQRX updates
I have had some time to hack on the GQRX receiver – my experimental AM/FM/SSB receiver implemented in Python (GNU Radio) and qith Qt GUI. Most notably, I have implemented audio recording, playback and squelch.