5 Cool Things You Can Do With An AIRSPY SDR Receiver

[Music] hi and welcome back to another tech minds videos so in this video we're gonna be taking a look at the s bi SDR receiver now this is a really nice little compact unit as you can see here it's it's got USB connection one end and the other end it's an SMA female to connect your antenna it's made of solid metal and and it feels really nice and solid in the hand now it was a comparison for size this is a any stos multi SDR receiver and we're also gonna put a RS Pedro from SDR play next to it just so you can see the size of what the ear spy is as you can see it's fairly similar to the newer lick now there are many things that you can do with the nests by mini you can use it as a portable radio monitoring station you can use is a real-time spectrum analyzer use it for receiving a dsba TC radio astronomy satellite if' even telemetry receiver uses a wideband scanner use it for educational purposes and of course you can use it for ham radio I want to concentrate on five things which i think is pretty cool out of that list so the first thing we're gonna be looking at is VHF and uhf radio monitoring now we're going to use a piece of software called SDR sharp which is actually made by s by I'll leave a link down in the description of where you can download this SDR receiving a software from so once you've got it installed you need to go ahead and select your s by device you can also change the sample rate and then we can also choose the mode in which we want to listen I'm going to start off with listening to something on no more FM radio band so I'm going to set the mode to wfn which is wide FM and I'm going to set the frequency you can use your mouse just by using the scroll wheel on your mouse if you have one to change the frequency by holding your mouse over the numbers or you can actually click on each of the peaks that are there so for re tune the s by mini using the software to around for 30 megahertz you're going to find some amateur radio activity now this is the UHF part it also covers two meters as well so anything between twenty-five and one point eight gigs us 1800 megahertz so between that we do get quite a few different ham radio bands at the moment this is currently listening to a repeater a good few miles away let's take a little listen now one of the good things with SDR sharp because it is an SDR receiver you can see a whole few megahertz or scope on the screen of activity so when you see some other Peaks you can just click on them and start listening to them let's jump to a band a bit lower than here let's have a listen around one hundred and thirty megahertz we're gonna find aircraft aircraft transmitted primarily on a.m. as amplitude modulation so let's have a little listen to see if we can find something to listen to I'm going to be 155 miles with coffee today and what are the other cool things you can do with an s by many using the SDR software see our shop is decode digital audio now the reason for this is because the feature of STL sharp allows you to output the audio to something called like virtual cable now virtual cable is like a an audio cable within your computer which you can then route the audio to another application so in this example we're going to be looking at using DSD Plus now DSD plus is available from the internet I'm using a fast lane version which is more up-to-date and what this dances the coach digital audio ldsd plus supports d-star fusion c for FM DMR p25 etc and it's very easy to use in this example here that you can see I have dears T plus running I have the audio output of a steel shot routed to DSD Plus and you can see and hear the audio being decoded I'm actually listening to my open spot to which is connected to to a reflector let's take a listen and hear what it sounds like [Music] no we're not excusing yet even I have I'm on ya from 9 o'clock 10 o'clock 10:30 onwards to about 9 o'clock my man usually on a year see for FM next which is Norfolk so another cool thing that you can do is listening to DAP radioed Abbie's digital audio broadcast now normally transmits around think 220 makes that kind of area has a really wide man with and it's digital so if you go ahead and try listening to it just on SDR shop are you just gonna hear whole load and noise so what we can do is we can download a bit of software called welly IO and install that on to your computer now I'm going to be showing the windows version I do have other versions for different operating systems but the version I'm going to show you is for Windows and I'm using Windows 10 now there's no other software that you need all you need to do is just have your s by mini plugged into your computer and an appropriate antenna now once you've got it installed and it seems to be working make sure your s my plugged in and an appropriate antenna click the little three dots on the left hand side of the screen there and select start scanning it will then actually start scanning through all the different available channels for DAB radio stations now as you can see here it's populating a list of found radio stations on the left-hand side and if you want to listen to one once it's finished scanning I've actually speeded this up but it takes around 2 or 3 minutes to do a full scan but if you want to listen to a station you just simply just click it on the left and that will then actually start decoding now you may find that some of them are not as strong as others so you may get some kind of gobbling or some kind of distortion or not decoding properly using the little orange plus in the bottom right hand corner you can add these extra little kind of monitoring boxes so you can have a look at how strong the signal is and how good quality the decode is as well so as well as showing the track information and station information while it's playing you can actually have a look at the spectrum and have a look at the technical side of it behind it while it's playing now this is great it's just a single application and if you like listening to stations that are broadcast on the dab radio network then you can just go ahead load the software select the station you want to listen to and just minimize it and away you go you can carry on doing whatever you is doing so there you go that's a real easy way of listening to dab just using your s bi and the welly IO software running your computer it's called found you treat points where people's phones are inspected and the use of facial recognition technology Darren bi-lo is an anthropologist at the University of Washington where he researches crying I've watched his brother training i watch better training I've put all of them this is proper fitness then go ahead please the way Federer does now another cool thing you can do with an S by mini is to track aircraft and see live aircraft plot on a map now to do this you need two bits of software one is called a DSP spider XE and the other is virtual radar server I'll leave a link down in the description where you can get virtual radar server from but a DSP spy is actually included in the installation folder or Wester your shop but all you need to do is open up the installation folder for SEO shop and run the ad SB spy software click start and assuming that you've got your s by mini connected it will then technically tune your s by mini to 1090 megahertz and start receiving data from aircraft now we then use another bit of software called virtual radar server now what that does it connects directly to the ad SB spy software and it will then decode those transmissions and those location packets and it will generate an HTTP server locally on your computer what that means technically is that you're able to then view that content on a web page now as you can see here this was recorded quite late at night so there's not that many aircraft but you can see here that you've got some aircraft that are moving around on the map you can even click on them view the type of aircraft they are and whole load of other information as well now this is obviously going to be quite dependent upon the type of antenna that you've got connected they do sell specific 1090 Meg's ATSB antennas for foot for this usage so they guess a really cool little feature that allows you to track aircraft in your vicinity or in your area and if you have a really good antenna you can actually pick up aircraft from hundreds of miles away now if you're interested in actually setting this up yourself like going for by step have a look through some of my older videos I go through each of the steps on how to get all of this working so this video is just purely about showing you what it can do so the last thing that we're going to look at that you can do with your s by many is decoding weather satellites now we need two pieces of software we need to go back to using SDR shop and we also need to use an application called WX to IMG now SDR shop will output this audio to virtual audio cable and then on a WX to IMG you will set the input as your your VB audio cable now one of the features of WX to ymg it allows you to look at a list of the next available satellite pass or weather satellite pass for your location you just have to pop in your latitude and longitude and then it will work out and show you like a list of passes now I've done separate videos on this on how to do each an individual thing that you can set up so go back through my videos if you want to see exactly the settings that you need to make know as you can see here on the screen I'm actually starting to receive a satellite weather satellite and as a satellites passing overhead is transmitting lines of data which make up an image I'll just play you a few seconds of what it actually sounds like the the audio that's coming from the from the satellite you and here you go this is a processed image as it's receiving it kind of receives it in black and white and everything but then once the the pass is finished it will actually process the image into something that's a bit more tangible something you can see see clearly and you can easily see whether where the clouds are you know I guys I hope you enjoyed this video this is a five cool things you can do with the s by many there are many many more things that you can do with it and have a look through my old videos and you probably find some things that you've that you've never thought and never even thought about before and if you're looking at purchasing an S by minute you can purchase it from Moonraker d'Or EU I'll leave a link to that website down below anyway until the next video take care and I'll see you in the next one [Music]

Channel: Tech Minds

Views: 92,299

Keywords: 5 cool, sdr, airspy, hamradio, amatuer, software, defined, radio, dsd, dstar, c4fm, fusion, decode, wefax, adsb, acars

Id: Zq12KeRSx8Y

Length: 13min 24sec (804 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 25 2019