Beginners guide to SDR #2 [ setting up antenna and SDR sharp ]

hello everyone welcome to sdr part two how to set up your sdr software defined radio today we're gonna plug in our sdr set up the antenna and learn how to use the sdr software and set everything up now first what you're going to need is you're going to need an antenna so we're using the sdr kit that came with the sdr you know just for simplicity and so you guys can follow along uh beefy antennas will come later on so first i have this diapol antenna it's pretty long it goes uh like five feet six feet uh we're also going to be using the so it has it's only about a foot but we're also gonna be using the super long six foot extender cable it came with this cable will allow us to get shortwave radio and fm radio better because this cable uh when when laid out long it can pick up quite a bit for such a cheap little sdr kit it's a good i would say six to eight feet yeah it's a good six to eight feet so you want to stretch it out so first you want to get your sdr make sure your antenna is plugged in like so make sure it's nice and tight you want to plug it into a usb port now you can on most devices you can get away with usb 3.0 but on some devices it doesn't like it so we're going to be using this 2.0 port it's connected to this little extender piece that goes all the way to the back of my computer with the only available 2.0 port remaining we're going to plug this in and now it works and now we got to get the antenna to work so it's pretty simple actually we're going to get the sdr we're going to stick it to the window because it comes with a suction cup and a little tripod piece uh we want to put it on the exterior window you want an exterior window if you have a two-story house and your bedroom so happens to be in the second story well that's good got a higher chance of getting more goodies up high right want to make sure it's all the way extended so it looks something like this this cable right here is not to waste you want to extend it as much as you can uh put it up against something like this desk chair so it looks it's like a little telephone wire so you want it like this and that will get us way better signal on ham radio shortwave and fm because this cable doubles as an antenna now let's go set up sdr sharp okay hello guys now we're on the desktop now we're going to install the good stuff so we're going to download the software defined radio package it includes the rtl sdr driver and including some other ones and this has all the drivers you need so we're going to download it it is done and you're also going to want to download this net 6 framework this is 32-bit and the virtual studio code 22. make sure you restart after you install this i'm not going to download them because i have them but you just click on the little links and it should take you there now if you're having issues with this one that you could try is net framework 32-bit for 5.04 i found that it fixes problems sometimes if you're having them make sure you download the runtime installer for x86 link in description just in case okay now that we have it installed we're going to go to the downloads folder i have here's uh there it is or make a new folder sdr sharp and we're going to extract it it's done you can just use standard winzip doesn't matter okay so now we have this but you can't just open it yet now you have to install the special driver software which is right here you double click its install it's like a little bat file it's a kilobyte it's going to go fetch the driver folder stuff it's done now before you do anything here comes the hard part okay the part i've issues with you're going to want to open up zigzag which makes itself when you run that file that we just ran now and so see nothing's showing up now this will happen if you're on usb 3.0 i am on 2.08 still showing up you can try to list all devices and you can try right here you want to look for balkan interface zero see there's a green arrow there reinstall driver i'm sure it's not showing up because i already have the driver installed make sure you're looking for bulk in interface at zero make sure the arrow is green you can try one if zero's not there but it's most likely zero it's finished now you're ready so we're gonna open the file and if everything was done correctly and you tried the backup stuff you should be able to load sdr sharp okay loaded but you're not ready yet now when you switch this over to rtl sdr usb and if you're lucky you should hear something bingo it works well the gain is way too high we can just lower the range and the offset a little bit so these these just change the look this is zoom contrast uh we could try a station i know 105.9 we could try 107.3 oh gas station here look at that we got one it's a little weak so we're gonna want to do is we're gonna open this we're gonna turn on this and this uh i highly recommend you be careful when turning this on because this can happen there we go 107.3 it's like my local station uh this is the little thing so this is your bandwidth right here like how much how wide it takes uh be careful the higher you go there's always complications to doing certain things for tuner this is ak this is automatic gain control you can turn this off and you can set a custom gain you can see it's live but we don't want it too high we don't want to overload the sdr uh this is yeah zero zero is pretty good actually we can actually hear they're talking the media alexa asked magnum media to play wsjy when you needed your mom so yeah it's actually pretty good even though i have zero db gain i'm getting the station extremely clear and that's because i have my antenna on the window on the exterior wall all the way out and i actually have the cord stretched throughout my floor therefore i'm getting a super strong signal so you're going to have to go through the sdr and air sdr sharp forms if you want to figure out what all these little do hickeys do we're going to be using shift for our next tutorial which will be to use an up converter and that also tell you oh yeah turn this on you can get some data from the fm stations uh there's a lot of things you could do for example like you can have code channelers and all sorts of garbage right my favorite is the where is it see and then you can drag this and stuff there's also one for uh favorites like if you want like uh you could turn this on and have a little bit of reduction of noise if you don't want it sounding so bad like if you have static so he's having trouble getting some data here so we're gonna slightly increase the there we go look at that now that's the sweet spot see look at that data now so yeah that's how you use it now if you want to do low if you want to do short wave or am it's a little tricky that's this what's enough converter is for but you can't it can be done you're going to want to switch this to direct sampling cube branch which will remove the whole option of adjusting that you could just got that right and then you want to go all the way down to the medium wave it's not very good but as you can see we picked up a station here yeah a lot of these are blank yeah you see we're not really picking up anything and that's because well simple this antenna is just too dang small but if you are if you're sneaky enough you can get am radio with the wire and the antenna you just have to have it span as far out as you can in a horizontal you know line not up and down it likes back and forth better you can probably do up and down if you want to get some more air you have it stretched out as much as possible and if you're lucky you might be able to get some am shortwave for sure you can get i'm sure of actually let's see if there's any shortwave we can get now even though it's daytime that's another promised day you're not going to get that stuff during the day uh we do got something it looks like for the shortwave um possibly nope yeah a lot of this is just noise it's just daytime noise you know you're not gonna find any shortwave or am during the night well this is a lot of noise yep it's just all nice yeah we're at the wait until night time and should we feel it we get some this might work hey we got it so yes we got some shortwave yeah see like i said it span your antenna now and you're gonna get some goodies so yes that is how you use an sdr and setting it up with sdr sharp i also showed you a little bit of the application next we are gonna set up an up converter and use it so stay tuned for the next episode

Channel: Alex ware studios

Views: 559

Keywords: SDR, SDR#, SDR sharp, SDR for beginners, software defined radio

Id: Kplw2bgoa9k

Length: 10min 35sec (635 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 05 2022