[ML-Hams] Software defined radio... thing

[Kris Kirby]

On Mon, 22 Aug 2016, David wrote:
> That's your standard RTLSDR software defined radio.  We use them in 
> flightworthy ADS-B units called stratux with software that runs on the 
> RPi-2 and -3 (and zero but why??)

Nice!
 
> There are better units that cost about $5 more but yours will work 
> just fine.  Check out gnuradio if you really want to geek out on radio 
> stuff with it.  You can use your SDR to get FM or AM radio or really 
> anything in the band between about 1 MHz to about 2 GHz and they work 
> quite well, especially with Linux software.  :)  you can even get 
> HDRadio (just digital radio with better SNR than standard FM) with 
> your unit.

I recommend the HackRF, but that's because it captures 8 MHz wide and 
you can get an up/down converter for it to cover other parts of 
interest. IIRC the RTL requires an upconverter to RX 1 - 60 MHz... which 
I only figured out a tenth into a cross-country drive, when monitoring 
Channel 19 would have been useful... 

OTOH, for something like that, you could make an array of SA506s on SMT 
cards....

--
Kris Kirby, KE4AHR
Disinformation Architect, Systems Mangler, & Network Mismanager