FlightAware is an online service providing real time flight tracking. The flights are primarily tracked by volunteers who run ADS-B decoding hardware which is networked through the internet to the FlightAware servers.

Now FlightAware have written in to RTL-SDR.com to let us know about their new PiAware software which enables a Raspberry Pi running dump1090 to contribute data to the FlightAware network. Dump1090 is a popular RTL-SDR compatible ADS-B decoder program for Linux systems.

A major perk for running their software and contributing data is that FlightAware will buy you a licensed copy of PlanePlotter.

The press release provided is quoted below.

If you are running an inexpensive Raspberry Pi ADS-B receiver with dump1090 then you can install the PiAware Package from FlightAware to freely view nearby flight traffic and transmit this data to FlightAware’s tracking network.  Most aircraft within Europe by 2017 and USA by 2020 will be required to have ADS-B transmitters onboard.

FlightAware’s user-hosted worldwide ADS-B receiver network tracks about 90,000 unique aircraft per day and feeds this live data into the FlightAware website in combination with other public/private flight tracking data sources.  FlightAware has over 500 user-hosted ADS-B sites online across 60 countries, with top contributors tracking over 10,000 aircraft per day.  To see how ADS-B data is put to use, check out the FlightAware Live Map.

The PiAware installation process takes only a few minutes.  If you don’t have PlanePlotter, you can download it and then send FlightAware your installation’s serial number and we’ll buy you a license.  FlightAware will also give users a free Enterprise Account ($90/month value) in return for installing PiAware.

The post FlightAware Introduces PiAware for use with RTL-SDR and dump1090 on a Raspberry Pi appeared first on rtl-sdr.com.

Micheal Ossmann, creator of the HackRF is starting an online video course on the topic of software defined radio (SDR). His course will cover GNU Radio and will help you to learn the fundamentals of digital signal processing. The first video has been released and in this video Micheal shows how to set up a broadcast FM receiver in GNU Radio.

To do the exercises in the course you will need a HackRF or other similar SDR radio. Most exercises involving reception only should be compatible with the RTL-SDR with some small modifications relating to things like the changing sample rate.

The post Micheal Ossmann’s Software Defined Radio Course appeared first on rtl-sdr.com.

Blogger “French Fry Cattaneo” wanted a portable laptop with built in SDR capability. To achieve this he opened up his Panasonic ToughBook CF-30 laptop and embedded an RTL-SDR FubCube dongle into the laptop using the space left by unused expansion ports.

Cattaneo connected the two SDRs to a small hub and soldered the usb hub connections directly onto a laptop USB port. He also installed an external SMA connector for the RTL-SDR and connected the FunCube’s antenna port to a cellular antenna that was built into the laptop.

He notes that there could be RF interference issues from the laptop, but has so far had no trouble receiving the strong signals he is interested in.

The post Modifying a Laptop by Embedding an RTL-SDR and FunCube Dongle appeared first on rtl-sdr.com.

A ready to go Ubuntu 14.04 image file for the BeagleBone Black that contains various SDR related resources for the RTL-SDR and other SDRs like the HackRF has been released by KD0CQ. The BeagleBone Black is a small embedded PC that is powerful enough to run many SDR software programs. The image file is very useful as installing some software like GNU Radio on an embedded PC can be very tedious. Below is a list of software included in the image file.

• GNURadio 3.7
• keenerd’s rtlsdr bundle
• gqrx
• multimode (having issues compiling, will contact author. Prob compatibility issues with gnuradio 3.7)
• LTE-Cell-Scanner
• LTE-Tracker
• multimon – Pogsac Pager Decoder
• rtl_flex_noX – Flex Pager Decoder
• SuperKuh’s Dongle Logger – pyrtlsdr – Fast version
• rtl_433
• SDR-J
• rtl_sdr wide spectrum analyzer
• DSD 1.7
• RTLAMR
• RTL_FM_Python

The post BeagleBone Black Image File with RTL-SDR + GNU Radio + More appeared first on rtl-sdr.com.

Since the HackRF was shipped to Kickstarter backers there have been a few new short videos uploaded to YouTube showing some transmit experiments that people have done.

Here YouTube user CFSworks uses his HackRF to record and replay a signal that causes the charge port on his Tesla Model S electric car to open.

In this video YouTube user Chief Tinker shows his HackRF being used to ring his house doorbell.

In this video YouTube user alaindecarolis uses his HackRF with hackrf_transfer to record and replay a voice signal from a standard Kenwood mobile radio.

Here YouTube user Jiao Xianjun shows the program he created that allows someone to send arbitrary Bluetooth Low Energy (BTLE/BT4.0) packets via a HackRF board.

Finally this video shows a little public mischievousness with YouTube user sigmounte using his HackRF to turn off certain street lights via the Urban Light Management system which uses simple radio CCIR tones.

The post HackRF TX YouTube Videos appeared first on rtl-sdr.com.

The military air communications monitoring enthusiasts over at milaircomms.com have been using a system involving RTL-SDRs to monitor military air traffic through ADS-B. While military aircraft generally do not transmit GPS position information like commercial aircraft do, they are still able to record live information such as the aircraft’s hex code, registration number, aircraft type, the base station location and a graph of recorded altitudes. They also log all this data showing where military aircraft have been spotted over time.

To receive this information they so far have a network of about 30 volunteers running RTL-SDR based ground stations that use their custom MilAirComms1090 software. If you want to contribute, the software is available for Windows and for Linux/Raspberry Pi.

The post Monitoring Military Aircraft with an RTL-SDR appeared first on rtl-sdr.com.

Over on the Osmocom mailing list, Oliver Jowett an RTL-SDR experimenter has posted about his new experimental driver for the R820T RTL-SDR which extends the tunable range down to around 13 and up to 1864 MHz (previously 24 – 1766 MHz). Oliver writes

You can get these changes from https://github.com/mutability/rtl-sdr/(you’ll need to build from source yourself). There should be no application changes needed, just tune as normal. (gqrx needs the “no limits” option turned on)

These changes work by limiting the tuner to a range of frequencies that it can reliably tune to, then allowing tuning beyond those bounds by making the 2832′s downconverter do the final bit of tuning. This can add up to 14.4MHz to each end of the range. Also, the tuner is switched to low-side mixing at the top of the range which gives a bit more range there. The practical range is limited by the width of the IF filter and aliasing effects at the extreme edges of the downconverter’s range.

I’ve been able to pick up broadcast AM and amateur CW/SSB down to around 15.5MHz without too much trouble.

I’d be interested to know how this works for others. Also.. these changes are likely to have broken offset tuning, direct sampling mods, and tuners other than the R820T, as it touches all those areas but I only have an unmodified R820T to test against. If you have different hardware and are willing to spend some time testing then please let me know. I expect that the range of the other tuners can be extended in the same way with not much trouble.

Over on the Reddit RTL-SDR discussion board there has been talk about this patch. Most users are reporting that it works well down to around 15 MHz, but some people are reporting that they have been able to receive signals down to around 4 MHz. Testers also report that this modified driver works much better than the no-hardware direct sampling mod patch released a few months ago.

The post New Experimental R820T RTL-SDR Driver that Tunes down to 13 MHz or Lower appeared first on rtl-sdr.com.

There is a war going on between game console designers and the console modding community. Modders hack the console system so that they can jailbreak it and then install their own custom firmware while console designers are constantly finding new ways to prevent unauthorized modding. Custom firmware allows a console to run homebrew applications like media players and emulators that use the console in ways that is was not intended to be used in.

One PlayStation 3 modder has recently been using an RTL-SDR to help jailbreak a PlayStation 3 Super Slim (4K) console, whose current official firmware appears to not yet have been jailbroken. It’s important to note that so far no actual jailbreaking has been done with this method, but the modder is currently working on it. His idea is to receive leaked RF signals from the PS3 and then use methods similar to Acoustic Cryptoanalysis to decode the data and find out what opcode operations the processors are performing. The modder writes about his method in the following.

My idea was to hook up a rtl-sdr device to the PS3 4k between chassis and real ground (yes, I actually have a two meter copper rod buried in my lawn) using the antenna leads. First I had to make sure the PS3 4k chassis wasn’t grounded in the outlet, and that no video out or USB connector was hooked up to ground indirectly via other hardware. If you want to try this, make sure that the rtl-sdr antenna leads are the only lead between the PS3 mobo/chassis and real ground. Before connecting the rtl-sdr antenna leads I measured the voltage on the PS3 chassis which peaked at around 1.8V which was safe enough, didn’t want to blow it up on the first try. 

This method will effectively turn your console into an “active antenna” leaking all kind of interesting data on the rtl-sdr frequency spectrum (between 24 – 1766 MHz). After hooking it up, I started using gqrx on my laptop to look for signal peaks while the PS3 4k was turned on, after finding a peak I just powered off the PS3 completely and turned it back on, using the waterfall plot you’ve seen in my first post I can see if there is something interesting happening during boot and verify that the signal is indeed coming from the PS3. In a similar way I learned to distinguish between the PS3 BD drive, GPU and CPU which pops up at different frequencies. Then I dumped the data (I/Q recording) that looked interesting and made a note of the frequency.

It’s hard to describe the incredible feeling when you tune into a good signal and start watching the waterfall plot revealing opcodes, register bits and what might be stack contents. The Acoustic Cryptoanalysis paper (PDF) has a lot of good info how to interpret the output from various window functions in the plot. 

What I’m coding right now is a gnuradio-companion block which will filter and test the dumped data for decryption keys against encrypted PS3 data. 

The post Hacking a PlayStation 3 using an RTL-SDR appeared first on rtl-sdr.com.

Over on the Reddit discussion boards user gat3way has posted about his newly released software project called swscan. Swscan is a Linux console based program that can be used to scan and listen to shortwave broadcast stations. It has a built in database of shortwave station frequencies as well as their broadcast schedules and it will even show you the stations power level and distance you are from the transmitter. Swscan is based on GNU Radio 3.7, so you will need to have that installed first.

As shortwave stations exist at frequencies below the normal tuning range of the RTL-SDR, you will need an upconverter or be using the latest R820T experimental driver which can tune down to around 1 MHz.

Swscan can be downloaded from http://www.gat3way.eu/poc/swscan.tgz.

The post SWSCAN – A Console Based Shortwave Broadcast Scanner for the RTL-SDR appeared first on rtl-sdr.com.

The R820T is the tuner chip that is used in the most popular RTL-SDR dongles. It turns out that there is also an R820T2 tuner chip available, but it does not seem to be used in any RTL-SDR dongles that we know of. According to superkuh’s RTL-SDR notes, the R820T2 has better sensitivity over the R820T with an apparent 6dB lower noise floor. It also has a wider IF bandwidth which makes no difference to the RTL-SDRs 3.2 MHz maximum bandwidth, but is why the Airspy with its 10 MHz of bandwidth is using the R820T2 in its design.

Nobu an RTL-SDR experimenter who had previously experimented with dongles retrofitted with TCXO’s has now retrofitted a standard RTL-SDR dongle with an R820T2 tuner chip (note that this post is in Japanese). The Google translation of this post is a little to difficult understand, but it seems that Nobu did notice an improvement due to the lower noise floor. If anyone can understand Japanese we’d appreciate confirmation on this in the comments.

The post Experimenting with the R820T2 Tuner Chip appeared first on rtl-sdr.com.

SDR Touch, the popular Android based software defined radio software for the RTL-SDR has been updated to version 2.0. This new version is a complete rewrite with many optimizations listed below.

• 100% rewritten from scratch
• Improved reception sensitivity and quality
• Optimized engine
• GUI overhaul (Landscape mode, more flexible)
• 16 bit audio
• FIR filtering

The author also writes that the rewrite allows for new features coming out in the future such as adjustable bandwidth, FFT size, plugins and a separate GUI for in-car use. SDR Touch is available from the Android Play store.

The post SDR Touch Updated to Version 2.0 appeared first on rtl-sdr.com.

Recently two new SDR# plugins have just been released.

The first is a plugin which shows the name and language of the shortwave station that is currently tuned in using data from short-wave.info. It can be downloaded from http://sourceforge.net/projects/sdrsharpshortwaveinfoplugin/.

The second plugin is a Digital Code Squelch (DCS) decoder plugin. The plugin will display the DCS codes that are transmitted with the signal and will display all possible compatible codes. DCS is a squelching system similar to CTCSS which allows for radio user sharing by ensuring that radio users are not bothered by communications not intended for them. The DCS Decoder plugin can be downloaded from http://www.rtl-sdr.ru/page/novyj-plagin-dcs-decoder (note page in Russian).

The post Two New SDR# Plugins Released: ShortWave Info and DCS Decoder appeared first on rtl-sdr.com.

In this episode of Hak5, a popular YouTube technology channel, Shannon shows how to use the RTL-SDR on Debian Linux. She shows how to install the RTL-SDR drivers from scratch if using a distribution without them pre-installed and also shows how to install and use rtl_fm, a command line FM demodulator.

The post Hak5: Installing RTL-SDR on Linux appeared first on rtl-sdr.com.

The Meteor-M N2 is a polar orbiting Russian weather satellite that was launched on July 8, 2014. Its main missions are weather forecasting, climate change monitoring, sea water monitoring/forecasting and space weather analysis/prediction.

The satellite is currently active with a Low Resolution Picture Transmission (LRPT) signal which broadcasts live weather satellite images, similar to the APT images produced by the NOAA satellites. LRPT images are however much better as they are transmitted as a digital signal with an image resolution 12 times greater than the aging analog NOAA APT signals. Some example Meteor weather images can be found on this page and the satellite can be tracked in Orbitron or online.

The RTL-SDR and other SDRs like the Funcube along with some free software can be used to receive and decode these images. LRPT images from the Meteor-M N2 are transmitted at around 137.1 MHz, so any satellite antenna like those commonly used with the NOAA weather satellites can be used.

Happysat, a satellite monitoring enthusiast has emailed us with a comprehensive tutorial showing how the RTL-SDR can be used to receive and decode these LRPT images (pdf warning) (txt file). The procedure is not quite as simple as with the NOAA satellites as it involves first pre-recording the transmission as a baseband I/Q file in SDR#, changing the sample rate in Audacity, processing the file with the Lrptrx.exe software, and then using Oleg’s LRPToffLineDecoder to finally produce the image.

The tutorial also shows an alternative and faster Linux based method using some GNU Radio scripts, but with the final processing still done with Oleg’s decoder in Windows.

The tutorial can be downloaded in PDF form from this link or alternatively in a text file here.

The post RTL-SDR Tutorial: Receiving Meteor-M N2 LRPT Weather Satellite Images with an RTL-SDR appeared first on rtl-sdr.com.

Some car security systems from around 2001 – 2003 use an embedded RFID tag inside the car key as an added security measure against key copying. Using his HackRF, ChiefTinker was able to analyse and decode the data from an active RFID token used in a car key. He notes that the same analysis could also be performed with an RTL-SDR dongle.

Upon powering the RFID tag with a power supply, ChiefTinker noticed that the tag emitted a short transmission every 5 seconds in the ISM band at 433.920 MHz. On closer inspection he determined that the transmitted data was encoded with a simple AM on-off keying (OOK) scheme. After importing the audio into Audacity and cleaning up the signal a little, he was able to clearly see the OOK square wave showing the transmitted binary data.

Next he analysed the data and compared the binary output against two different RFID keys. From the comparison he was able to determine that the tag simply beacons a unique serial number, which is susceptible to capture and replay attacks. After further processing he was able to convert the transmitted binary serial number into hexadecimal, then ASCII to find the unique serial number being broadcast in decimal.

The post Analyzing a Car Security Active RFID Token with a HackRF appeared first on rtl-sdr.com.

Over on YouTube user Cameron Conover has been testing a simple FM broadcast bandstop filter with his HackRF. The same filter can just as easily be used with the RTL-SDR to remove broadcast FM interference and images. Cameron uses a MCM Electronics 88 – 108 MHz FM Trap which can be found very cheaply on Amazon or Ebay for around $15 USD. His video shows that the FM trap works very well and significantly reduces out of band FM interference.

The post Testing a FM Broadcast Bandstop Filter appeared first on rtl-sdr.com.

Last month we posted about monitoring and logging military ADS-B data on milaircomms.com. It turns out that there is another service at www.live-military-mode-s.eu that also does military ADS-B logging. One user of live-military-mode-s.eu has recently uploaded a tutorial showing how to use a RTL-SDR to contribute to their logs. By contributing to their service you get a username and password to access members only sections of their site.

Contribution involves running an ADS-B decoder like RTL1090, sending the decoded data to Virtual Radar Server (VRS) and then using VRS to rebroadcast the data to their Mode-S Logger software.

The post Monitoring Military Aircraft with an RTL-SDR Part 2 appeared first on rtl-sdr.com.

Over on YouTube user S53RM has uploaded a video showing his and S53MM’s observation of the 1420 MHz galactic hydrogen line with an RTL-SDR. Hydrogen atoms randomly emit photons at a wavelength of 21cm (1420.4058 MHz). Normally a single hydrogen atom will rarely emit a photon, but since space and the galaxy is filled with many hydrogen atoms the average effect is an observable RF power spike at 1420.4058 MHz. By pointing a radio telescope at the night sky, a power spike indicating the hydrogen line can be observed in a frequency spectrum plot.

In the video they rotate their 3.6m parabolic mesh antenna dish along the Milky Way. As the dish rotates doppler shifted hydrogen line peaks can be observed on Linrad, each peak representing a different arm of the galaxy. The galaxy consists of several spinning arms, some spinning faster than others which causes the hydrogen line peaks produced by the arms to be doppler shifted by different amounts.

They used Linrad to plot the RF spectrum as they were able to use it together with a pulse generator to calibrate the RTL-SDR for a flatter frequency response.

More information about their project can be found at http://lea.hamradio.si/~s53rm/Radio%20Astronomy.htm.

The post Observing the 21cm Hydrogen Line with Linrad and an RTL-SDR appeared first on rtl-sdr.com.

Over on the Google Play store there is a new (released July 2014) RTL-SDR ADS-B Android app available for purchase called “ADS-B Receiver”. This app allows you to with the aid of an RTL-SDR and USB OTG cable, display live aircraft ADS-B data on your Android phone. This app can also be used to display the live ADS-B data in another app called “Avare”, which provides offline FAA aviation charts and other pilot tools on a Android phone.

The app can be downloaded as a trial version with a fixed limit on the number of packets allowed to be received, or the pro version for around $1.99 USD with no limits.

Previously on this blog we mentioned another similar RTL-SDR Android ADS-B app called “ADS-B on USB SDR RTL“.

The post New RTL-SDR ADS-B App for Android appeared first on rtl-sdr.com.

Dump1090 is a command line based ADS-B decoder for the RTL-SDR. It is considered by many to be the best ADS-B decoder for the RTL-SDR available at the moment. Dump1090 is most commonly used in Linux but over on his blog, SonicGoose has written a tutorial that shows how to use dump1090 on Windows with the popular PlanePlotter software. He also shows how to use ModeSMixer2, which is another command line utility that is used to combine data from multiple ADS-B decoders and then rebroadcast the combined feed.

SonicGoose writes that the reason that many PlanePlotter users are moving away from the simpler GUI based RTL1090 ADS-B decoder is because dump1090 provides better raw data to use for multilateration. Multilateration is a technique supported by PlanePlotter which used data shared from multiple receivers to determine the location of an aircraft, even if that aircraft is not transmitting location information.

The post Using dump1090 in Windows appeared first on rtl-sdr.com.