📡 Portapack Audio RX App Usage / Shortwave Listening

[Music] what's up guys so today what we're doing is we're taking a look at the receive audio app and I'm just going to share with you how I like to use it and hopefully it'll give you some ideas and help you use it more efficiently so we open it up in the receive section it's called audio app so when you open that you'll be at whatever setting you're at what I recommend you start with though is go up to here turn it from whatever it's on top so it's like a spectrum analyzer and you can see more of the spectrum you get a whole 10 MHz across so you see 5m on one side you see 5m on the other so you have 5 megahertz on each side that you're able to view visually so this can help you spot signals and is a great place to start with your hacker F and portter pack for listening to whatever it is you want to listen to now to get some practice I do recommend go up to the FM radio area so somewhere around 100 mahz is a great place to start now down here we have What's called the step and that's going to be how far it skips ahead when we scroll through the frequencies so it's at I have it at 100K and I like to do that so I don't go too far ahead because if you skip way too far ahead if you have it set on the default which is 1 MHz here if you go up here you're going to be skipping across entire megahertz at a time and if you're on something using a more narrow bandwidth like if you're on nfm or if you're on am using that step setting is going to be way too broad so it's going to jump ahead see as I go up one click will give me an entire megahertz up so I go from 11 to 12 to 13 but because we're on am we're not looking as far across as you can see it says 20K 20K here so we don't have a full visual on what is being missed in between and that's why I recommend you at least bring the step down to 100K and if you're in the short wave area say we're down to we'll go around somewhere around here now if we're down here we might want to even go even further further down to the 25k and what that means is when we go up here to browse through our frequencies if you note it's only going 25k at a time so it's going across 25k now if I were to leave it on the default I'd be jumping ahead and missing entire signals along the way because I'm only able to visualize 20K here 20K here so you have to take that into consideration to make the best use of your radio so what I like to start with is showing you how to pick up just FM so we want to pick up FM what will we do well we can put it on the SP the Spectrum analyzer here and get a view of the spectrum is really what it is it's it's just a view of the spectrum here so what we're going to do is we're going to take this and we have it on step 1M so it's going to jump up one at a time allows us to browse through quite quickly and if we see anything interesting on the way we can always jump on that signal and take a closer look at it so as I move up we're going to go all the way up to 80 something just so we can take a look at different signals and what you'll notice they look like lines here and why is that that's because we have a whole 10 megahertz across so some of these may actually be you know something more characteristic of voice but we can't see that when we're on this SP PEC setting what we might want to do in this case is narrow or close up a little further with the wide FM and now with this I can see it a little better now do I want to jump ahead and entire one mahz at a time no I don't so I'm going to go down to 100K and that's going to allow me to better find some of these stations I'm also going to move up the amplification here but be careful you don't want to go too high so I wouldn't go too high but as you notice that signal comes in nice and clear so you can also play around with this a bit don't go too high because you don't want to overload your receiver but you might want to go up you know 32 stop around there and you're you're looking for you know a nice saturated signal but not too saturated so I might move that up another bump and then you see you know it's coming in a little better we'll go over here and we'll also want to check our bandwidth see how wide it is see this you know the green here is going to show how much it's picking up so if you aren't actually capturing the entire thing if I change the bandwidth too narrow um I may miss some of that signal meaning that some things may not come through completely meaning that you might not have as good of clarity so you want to find the right bandwidth for the signal that you're trying to listen to you also of course are going to need to mind your volume button um and make sure you have this speaker icon up here activated because otherwise you're not going to have any sound now with the SP setting for the modulation here um this setting right here uh you're not going to be able to see quite as much but it's a great place to start to practice and it's going to give you a better view of the different signals in the area but if you're all the way down on shortwave you may want to change your step down to 25k so you can browse there um and you'll also want to change the frequency of course but first we'll go up to 1M again why because we want to scroll down quite quickly now if we only did 25k it would take us a much longer time to get all the way down to the area of signals that we're interested in so if I want to jump down that's a lot quicker this way okay and we can take a look out for familiar looking signals you can also just move your marker down here get on top of them and you can take a little bit of a closer look now since we're in the shortwave area the bandwidth is going to be much more narrow so we're going to move this down to a and then what we can do is move our step down to 25k that's going to give us a much better ability to not miss anything so we're scrolling through using this and it's going to allow us to see those signals when they do come up and you may need to turn up some of the amplification if you get a weak signal so you're going to want to make sure that you create a signal or at least you're able to receive a signal strong enough that you're going to be able to understand what they're saying so that is a tip for that but like I said what you're going to really want to start out with is with FM radio just to get the hang of all the settings on the audio receive app so when we jump all the way up we're going to take our step back up to one megahertz so we can jump up much quicker now we get all the way up towards where we can actually pick up the wide FM which is around here then we can go down here again we can go to 100K see that we have the ability to see everything within that 100K step means that we're not going to miss anything when we're scrolling through the frequencies so we're just going to practice first it's where I recommend everyone starts practicing now that is not someone talking you can tell and as you get used to using software def finded radio you're going to find as you can see it's almost like a voice wave pattern here so when we go down here we want to get on top of it and this is going to be the same for am if you're looking at shortwave what you can do is you want to get right in the center of that signal now once you do that and you get it lined up perfectly then you're going to want to go up here to your bandwidth so you go over to that then you go down here where it says BW standing for bandwidth then you might want to narrow it up a little bit all depending on the signal that you're receiving you want it to pick it up but you don't want it to go too wide because if you pick up too much you're going to get a lot more static because it's going to pick up everything within that bandwidth so you don't want to receive too wide when the signal is very narrow and the same with you don't want to receive too narrow if the band is much wider so you really want to fit everything in use this bandwidth to get it into place and then we can once you feel comfortable doing this you can also begin to look for shortwave and what's nice is the ionosphere allows it to bounce and travel much further at nighttime so you'll be able to pick up things much further away so I will show you some shortwave browsing now remember what I recommend I might not do this in the entire video but what I recommend for picking up shortwave is to set your first get it to am go down here go to 25k and then what you're going to do and that's after you get up to the placement that we're trying to go to okay here we go now we're moving our step back down because we don't want to skip anything so now that we've moved our step to 25k we're going to be browsing much you know we're going to be able to see all of that stuff so as we scroll through you can move it kind of quick but of course you don't want to overp pick up anything you might want to turn down some of the amplification if you're seeing a ton of you know thick red you don't want to burn out your radio so we can go through here and we can just keep looking obviously there's a lot of interference down here and the hacker f is not as I mentioned it's not the ideal receiver for listening to shortwave but it does work and we can make make it work by using this you know optimally and you can play around a lot more but I just wanted to share with you my personal way of browsing through taking a look at the signals so when I'm down here around you know 3 to 30 mahz I'll put it on possibly 25k set it to am and that way I don't miss anything on the screen I'm able to see those signals so we'll start off going to turn turn up a little bit of our VGA and our LNA our low noise amplifier so let's go ahead and get that a little higher we're going to get it up to about 32 got our modulation set to AM radio so as you can see AM radio is what we have it set to and let's go ahead and begin our search now take a look at this the step is at 100K by default it's 1 MHz if you continue scrolling each turn each Notch is going to go an entire one mahz across and because we only have 20K on each side we're going to miss something 25k uh for each turn of the knob each little click so we'll go ahead and we'll start scrolling up we have it on am what we're looking for is the characteristics of a uh Transmission in the shortwave range we're taking our time on this oh there we have something so now what I need to do is move down to the marker see that little red dot appeared when you have it up here you can even record right here I'm on record I could actually record some of this if I wanted to so let's go ahead down to the very bottom where that red marker shows up then scroll over with the knob until you make it all the way to the signal right right where that red Line's showing up now that we're in the center we can also go up here we can take a look at our bandwidth here and we can see what sounds best for the particular signal that we're picking up now as mentioned you're going to want to make sure you're picking up all of it you don't want to miss bits and pieces of it depending on what you're trying to pick up um say it's a if it were a very wide band you might use wfm in that frequency range around 100 mahz but in this case we don't need that I might even turn that up and you'll want your volume up all the way now you probably can't hear it very loudly just because this is using the default speaker that came with this open source SDR Labs radio but if you followed my earlier video I show you how to install a laptop speaker as your Porta Pac speaker and that's a much louder speaker so that'll work much better for you so there we go we've already picked one up now at this point we could actually go to this and click on that frequency we can even save this frequency and then we could even change the description if we wanted and using that delete button at the bottom you might name it something you might do NN that could just be the name for this instance uh so there we go it's saved as NN then you can load that frequency in different apps so if you want to work with it in different apps you can actually do that so we're going to continue moving up here oh look at that we found another so when we go down we will scroll over again so as you knowe I'm turning that knob right to the left and see all of that green you know that is somebody talking on this frequency and so we get that marker right on top and we have a little adjustment to make we go to the right a little further but we can hear it and a lot of times you'll pick up things in other languages and you know this is shortwave and these are people all around the world especially at night time you're going to get to pick up things a lot further away and after you go through that you know always check out your bandwidth as well because depending on where you're listening to and what you're listening to you may want to mess around with that to enhance it so there we go this looks like a religious channel here so we will continue on with spec you can take a look at a much wider 10 mahz across so you'll be able to see some of those signals and to be able to get a closer look you're going to want to change this from the spec over to something like am it's going to bring you much closer as you note the measurement is now 20K on each side so you'll play around with it a bunch and you know see what works for you start out with the FM stations that's what's really going to help you get adjusted to the settings and they're just much quicker and easier to pick up so you can do some practice with that you can see how it responds when you lower these amplification settings when you increase them you can see how it changes and interacts with that signal um so you have all these tools that you can play with and if you want to try browsing for shortwave you can take my advice set the step down to 25k then set it to a.m. here and then go ahead over to your frequency and just start browsing and that's how you're going to find your stations and once you find one get on top of it adjust the bandwidth adjust the modulation to fit the broadcast and you'll be good to go make sure to share this video guys I'm always doing these videos trying to help people out so I really appreciate when you take the time to repost these videos other places post them on social media it's a really great way to help and I'll be be back later with more on the hacker F the quarter pack H2 the Mayhem firmware and SDR [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] now it's suppos to feel [Music] [Music] you [Music] to it's to [Music] [Music]

Channel: 🥷 RTP Tech Tips 📡

Views: 858

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Id: ecfRHNae19U

Length: 20min 29sec (1229 seconds)

Published: Thu May 30 2024