RTL-SDR
My varied adventures with these cheap (ohhh so cheap) Software Defined Radios. Well actually they are just simple DVB-TV USB sticks so you can watch live off air telly on your computer. Some smarties worked out that they can be used as a basic 8bit SDR with most having having coverage from 50 ~ 1800 MHz. All for about $10 – amazing.
Instead of listing all the things you can do and play with, as there is now a vast store of web pages around doing just that. I am just going to showcase what I’ve done and I’ll leave it you to do more research about where you want to play. Wefax, ADSB just so much.
I’ve made a page so you can have a look at the APT WeFax pictures I’ve received from the NOAA weather satellites.
And another page for the digital LRAPT I am receiving from the new Russian satellite Meteor M2. Which is still a work in progress as I am trying to work around the limitations of the RTL-SDR sticks. 8 bit and it’s multi layered internal AGCs loops is corrupting many of the strong signals on the closer approaches of the satellite.
Got so keen I knocked a cheap (very cheap made from junk lying around) 12 element RHCP X-Yagi (2 x 6 elements). 8mm copper pipe, some stiff Al 2mm wire and 50mm conduit. Based on WA5BJV’s designs Which I rescaled to 137.5 and did the metric conversion. To save you effort here are the dimensions:
REF Rad D1 D2 D3 D4
1079 1026+ 999 972 972 876 Element Lengths
200 440 906 1385 1865 Spacing from Reflector
The two yagis are separated by 550mm to achieve RHCP and they are both feed with 360mm of RG59 for a little impedance matching. Took me about two hours to put together. Coat of back paint hides how cheap and nasty it is!