3 - RTL-SDR SDR# Tutorial - Shortwave Setup

hello and welcome to the third video in this series of videos I'm doing on the SDR which covers 100 kilohertz to 1.7 gigahertz in this video I'm going to show you how to set up SDR sharp to listen to shortwave broadcasts they typically use a.m. or lower sideband or upper sideband depending on what you're trying to tune into as you can see I'm back in the SDR folder that has the SDR sharp program this is probably one of the biggest tips I can give to you you want to hit the back arrow and hit it one more time and get to this SDR install folder you want to right click this and let click on copy and I would paste it here probably five times I'll just have five copies of it the reasoning behind this is it's an exercise and insanity to use just one SDR sharp installed to try to do everything with it's so much better - for instance the the default one I'll right-click it and rename it and I'll call it SDR sharp space - space VHF and one of these other ones I'll right-click on and renamed to SDR sharp space - space shortwave um but the let me fix that H the reasoning behind this is for instance you might have a local police department which uses truck tracking so you would have to use a program called uni trucker to tune in to the control frequency and have it set up to communicate with SDR sharp to automatically tuned to the frequency being used by the group that you wish to follow so you might have an SDR sharp for that SDR sharp front and you might have the other needs to you might want to just track aircraft or whatever and there are plenty of tutorials online on how to do that with SDR sharp but anyway we're now going to double click the shortwave folder and double-click SDR sharp and then open SDR sharp and as you can see it's still where it was from the previous video but we have to do a couple of settings here in order for it to work on shortwave namely under radio you'll probably want to use a.m. and go to configure and at this point the sampling mode has been on quadrature sampling you need to change this to direct sampling q-branch and as you can see the boxes for offset tuning and tuner a GC or grayed out as is the RF gain slider but the RTL a GC box can be checked or unchecked you'll more than likely want to have this checked so you get a bit further range with your shortwave set up so we'll hit close and we'll go over to the time signal which is at 5000 kilohertz or 5 megahertz when you're talking shortwave it's better to say the frequency out and kilohertz instead of megahertz so instead of saying 5 megahertz you'll it's preferred to save 5,000 kilohertz so we will go ahead and click the start button and unmute the audio you hear ticking away in the background and I see the times about to change so I'll be sign at the tone 7 hours 15 minutes coordinated Universal Time now I'm gonna hit the zoom slider and as you can see I'm perfectly in tune right in the middle of the peak for the broadcast so let's see out here um let's just see what's here's one at 48 40 kilohertz you can take your mouse pointer try to put the line in the middle of the peak and then left-click and alt in it you can also do the same thing down here in the waterfall but I like to try to leave this here in the middle of everything and I'll take my mouse pointer and I'll put it out here and hold down the left mouse button and just move my mouse left and right to tune in what I want to hear so let's do that is gonna be long 5-minute there we go to get complete control so there's 48 48 kilohertz you would need some kind of a cyber Pearl Harbor the economy which sounds like honey spear siclari broadcast just a second we'll see if there's any hams talking one of the best frequency ranges to find ham radio operators is usually three thousand to five thousand kilohertz so I'll drag over here to the three thousand range as you can see it's quite noisy so we'll want to go over here to the range slider and lower it it looks like about negative fifty would be a better point instead of negative 70 so we'll drop that down to negative 50 now in this range sometimes a ham will be broadcasting on am but most times they're going to be using lower sideband to tell if the broadcast is that you will see this this peak over here is a bad example actually but you'll see here in these little spikes you'll see one that kind of a little bit more slowly moves up and down and that should be a ham operator using sidebands let me go up here to in here will see I'm thinking right in here a couple yeah there's a strong one right there let's see how the peak goes up when he's talking and then down up and down so we know that that's lower sideband so we will enable LSB and I'll kind of try to get over here to that peak this is where I'll use my zoom slider quite a lot to try to fine-tune so let's raise it a little and you can see I'm off just a little bit let me change these two zeros here and you before I enable the audio you'll probably notice that I'm going to be fine-tuning sometimes you don't have to mess with these Hertz numbers but sometimes with sideband broadcast you you will you might have to use like a point one point one five point two point two five and so on but you you try to fine tune it to where they sound normal because they're going to sound a bit garbled until you get it just right so I'll go ahead and unmute it and you'll see that I'll be trying to fine tune it when that stronger broadcast comes on funny enough on frequency with me see that's actually pretty good right there here's another one here at about 38 32 so we'll just click here go down to that same brother Oh yeah you can sit in lesson two hands all 90 they talk about all kinds of stuff this guy's limits sometimes you'll run into some of the weirdest conversations you've ever heard another popular range for ham broadcasts are like in the 7000 filler hoods range and another is the 15,000 filler words range as you can see we can't see too much here at the bottom line so actually need to raise the range of to not negative 70 let me move the audio for just a second here just recently Nepal had a very bad earthquake and the him guys we're using I believe it was fourteen point two one five and fourteen point two oh five to kind of do a global broadcast to get messages back and forth to Nepal and I think they were even trying to send them ham radios so they could communicate until they get their communications restored which was kind of cool but usually in this range instead of lower sideband they use upper sideband so far I haven't really seen any activity I might be too high here let's go to let's get to this range so like one of these Nepal frequencies was for nonemergency and the other one was for emergency only but as you can see there's not much activity going on here tonight so let's let's listen to a few broadcasts which are more than likely a.m. and drop the zoom back down I'm in the middle of the United States sometimes I can hear Radio Australia on the other side of the planet on 10 960 it looks like maybe they're coming in let me unmute it and we'll have a listen here they're not coming inside so what's this around here a woman see that's probably just a birdie maybe a sort of there are four or five mobile home trailer launch there were very violent as you explore shortwave this voice you're hearing now you're going to hear a lot on a lot of different frequencies on TV at the audio department here for just a moment yeah there's a lot of Jesus on shortwave I think the biggest reason it's not so much to save any Souls here in the United States though that's one of the intentions but I think the bigger intention is to is to spread Christianity to the Muslim countries and a lot of those countries use shortwave radios quite a lot so it makes sense to broadcast on shortwave to get your message across let me unmute the audio here um I'm not entirely sure what this is it might be erm broadcast again it's still a kind of new technology it hasn't really tooken off yet but a lot of broadcasters are going to digital shortwave broadcasts in order to listen to them typically I believe they use upper sideband and you have to pipe the audio through a program to decrypt it as you know with police and fire and EMS you would use something like DSD Plus with this there's a program called dream which you can type the audio through and it will decrypt it I don't have it presently installed so we can't decrypt thus assuming that that is in fact a drm shortwave broadcast but let me unmute the audio and we'll keep exploring here the strong one yeah ya know there's a Spanish numbers lady you might hear that every once in a while funny meter nobody really knows what these are more than likely they're broadcasting despise maybe here in the United States it's hard to tell what country they're from obviously a Spanish country probably some Central American country maybe Mexico maybe Cuba who knows but it's kind of interesting too it's kind of interesting to listen to them let me unmute the audio and we'll explore a little bit more here at which I'd stop hitting configure might hit unmute on these ones that sound funny it's kind of hard to tell exactly what they are obviously but a lot of times they're probably submarines they could be weather buoys heck they could even be doing satellite communications it who knows exactly without researching the frequency but they're broadcasting on but a lot of times you can go to a search website and just type 85 oh it's probably actually 505 but you can type 80 505 or 80 504 space kHz and hit enter and sometimes you can find reports of broadcasts on that frequency and find out what it actually was but the siren the smell of of course either looks something for all I know coming in the rain um a lot of these standard shortwave broadcasts you'll see the kilohertz will end with either a zero or five not consumed now you tell me yourself likes more Jesus to me it's gone check out this I can't quite make that weather five going to use from 105 industries in Plano Texas a lot of Jesus Jesus Jesus uses finishing people in order to do that job there's that one guy again he sounds like an old guy from the Bronx whenever that's what I think when I write here is Troy's need a kid be Jesus object anyway not ride and so forth and so on but they had not alaikum to go back to five thousand kilohertz to the time signal um when you're looking for shortwave broadcasts if you're like you know searching on your computer a lot of the times are shown in a coordinated time UTC UTC is a Greenwich I believe that's correct pronunciation of GMT it's also called Zulu but one of the cool things you can do with your windows clock and I've already done this if you right-click it and go to adjust date time and go to the additional clocks tab you can check this box to show this clock and select UTC coordinated Universal Time and a good name to give it as UTC space slash space GMT hit apply and ok and now you can left-click on your clock and the smaller clock is coordinated Universal Time so we now know it's 7:30 to a.m. Friday whereas my local times 2:30 - so let's so if I find something artistic spirit area network just go up to about 15,000 how did you get out order boys decided to erase that country from them Oh No said Oh bro Spanish lady but yeah I'm I was kind of hoping we could pick up some radio Australia I like to listen in on them it's kind one of the beauties of shortwave is you get a different perspective from international news broadcasts and music that you just would be hard-pressed to get otherwise before I close this video one thing I need to tell you and if you remember back from the first video there are two antenna connectors one covering 100 kilohertz to 25 megahertz and the other one doing 25 megahertz to 1.7 gigahertz when you get into that range of actually instead of 25 it really should say 24 megahertz but regardless of that what you start seeing happening is stuff being broadcast at lower frequencies is kind of in a way rebroadcasting itself at a higher frequency it's just the circuitry of these STRs which do that but see I'm getting into the 24 and as you can see it's almost throwing up the band we would be seeing down that in the 3000 range which I'll go to real quick see it's kind of this noisy band let's go back to 23 24 see there's 23 there's 24 so yeah we're kind of getting that a ghost of it yeah here it is in there if for instance you wanted to hear an AM broadcast past say 24 megahertz such as citizens band radio instead of using your shortwave version which let me close the shortwave version here and we'll hit the back arrow instead of using that you'll probably want to use one of your ones that you have set up for higher frequencies so I'll use the VHF one here and I'll set it to a.m. and we'll go to about Oh 26 on a do it and hit the start button as you can see this is much quieter B and the reason is right here it's using quadrature sampling and so direct sampling of the cube branch so maybe I can find somebody talking on CB maybe I've really seen any really big Peaks I mean here might be one right here hey unmute the audio and we'll have a listen here for a moment and there are hands of these ah but yes we're now getting into the 24 megahertz range and what you're going to see happen drops off to get past 24 and it's because they're using that different sampling mode well anyway that should cover it for this video the next word the next video will be the last video in this series it's just going to quickly talk about plugins give you a few tips on on installing a plug-in and just a little conclusion

Channel: Stormin' Norvin

Views: 36,854

Keywords: SDR#, SDRSharp, SDR, Sharp, RTL, Guide, Setup, Tutorial, Shortwave, SWL, DXing, RTL-SDR

Id: Yz_wrTvXN6g

Length: 30min 52sec (1852 seconds)

Published: Fri May 01 2015