[clug] Next CLUG meeting - August 28

[Mike Carden]

> Best. CLUG. Ever. (IMHO, and I've been to a few).


Thank Bob - high praise indeed!

Thanks to everyone who mucked in and had a go.Thanks Stephen for the link
to more dump1090 software (looks like I have something to try this weekend)
and to both Bob and Stephen for their successful demonstrations of the
Cranial Groundplane vertical antenna.

A couple of things. I realised as i was driving home why my shinysdr demo
was so poor. Remember I mentioned that the last thing I was listening to
was an amateur radio 2m repeater? Well, that's Narrow Band FM and when I
went hunting FM broadcast stations I neglected to switch back to Wide Band
FM. So Operator Error.

Also, I guess I never really emphasised the software things I was trying to
get to. Ideally, I wanted everyone to try:

* shinysdr for a nice GUI general purpose radio receiver.
* dump1090 to look at nearby aircraft
* sdr-j to listen to DAB+ digital radio

In particular, sdr-j can be a bit tricky to get going with a bit of
tweaking of the .pro file needed before compiling the code in order to make
it happy. I'd intended to shoulder-surf anyone trying this and attempt to
offer assistance.

So if you do give sdr-j a go and have trouble building it, please feel free
to email me and I will do what I can to point you in the right direction.
I'm no expert, but I did get it going on the Pi and on Korora without too
much trouble.

And just like Stephen did, if anyone finds any more interesting software
out there with which to do more fun stuff with a Realtek dongle, please
share so we can all check it out.

Finally, the link in my notes file to the greatscottgadgets web site will
take you to a brilliant and accessible series of instructional videos that
will give you a much deeper understanding of SDR and digital signal
processing. Highly recommended.

Thanks,
MC