[clug] Listening to digital radio with Open Source software

[Stephen Hocking]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for that - I've been messing around with the dump1090 software in
many of its variants, and logging the data to a PostGIS DB. I'm hoping to
give a talk about it at some stage. Having a good view of Canberra Airport
gets you thinking along those lines ;^).

On 7 August 2016 at 10:02, Mike Carden <mike.carden at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Sat, Aug 6, 2016 at 8:48 PM, Stephen Hocking <stephen.hocking at gmail.com
> > wrote:
>
>> Thank you Mike - this has been one of the things I've been wanting to try
>> out. A lot of these devices can do FM as well, have you had a chance to try
>> that?
>>
>
>
> Sure. Listening to broadcast analogue FM is kind of the Hello World of SDR
> dongles.
>
> If you 'apt-get install rtl-sdr sox' you'll get a suite of command line
> tools called rtl_<name> including one called rtl_fm. With that, you can do
> a CLI one liner to listen to FM radio, but figuring out the right frequency
> offset to tune the dongle can be a bit hit or miss. Somethig like this
> plays local FM for me:
>
> rtl_fm -M wbfm -f 104.8M | play -r 32k -t raw -e s -b 16 -c 1 -V1 -
>
> There are all sorts of fun things being done with SDR dongles. Using the
> dump1090 software you can monitor aircraft in your vicinity on a realtime
> map in a web browser.
>
> To learn more about SDR, I recommend this great series of video
> presentations:
> https://greatscottgadgets.com/sdr/
>
> Also, there is a group in the USA who hold monthly CLUG-like meetings
> called Cyberspectrum. Search for them on YouTube to find some great
> technical talks about SDR.
>
> And for all things related to the dongles, it's worth keeping an eye on:
> http://www.rtl-sdr.com/
>
> --
> MC
>
>
>