DRAGON OS FOCAL - The Software Defined Radio Toolbox

[Music] t3wri go free whiskey radio hle calling cq4g cq 40 cq 4g [Applause] goal 3 whiskey for radio italy calling hi and welcome back to another tech minds video so in this video i want to give you a brief overview of what i think has got to be the best collection of software tools for software defined radio installed on our linux operating system this is called dragon os focal essentially it's an iso image of lubuntu but with an absurd amount of sdr applications already installed and set up to be used now we'll go through some of the installed applications shortly but first let's take a look at how we install dragon os so firstly you're going to need the latest dragon os iso file which can be downloaded free from the internet i'll leave a link in the description below now the iso file is around four gigabytes so you will need to consider storage space now there are a few options on how you could run dragon os but i decided to use a free virtual machine application called vmware player this allows me to run a linux environment on a virtual machine on my windows 10 pc now i have a quite a high spec pc so if your computer is not fast enough to handle virtual machines then i would recommend to either install the iso on a free computer that you can dedicate to dragon os or alternatively you can write the iso to a usb stick and run it as a live installation and once you've downloaded the iso you can then go ahead and download vmware player and install it once installed run the vmware player and you'll be presented with a screen like this we now need to add a new virtual machine so go ahead and click on create a new virtual machine at the next pop-up select install a disk image and then click the browse button to select the dragon iso file that you previously downloaded and then click next ensure that linux is selected for the guest operating system and here i've selected ubuntu 64-bit for the version now the next pop-up will allow you to give your virtual machine a name such as dragon os or whatever you'd like to call it you can also change the location of where the virtual machine files will be stored just in case you need to put it onto a data drive for example the next screen will prompt you to enter a maximum disk size with 20 gigabytes being its default now i change mine to 30 gigabytes as i have plenty of free space on my drive click next and then click finish now before clicking on your new virtual machine and pressing play select the new virtual machine and then click on edit virtual machine settings here you can change the available memory and the amount of processors that you'd like to assign to this virtual machine now these settings will be dependent upon your machine specifications if you're unsure just leave the default settings as they are now once we come out of this screen we can now select dragon os and click the green play button at the top this will now start to boot dragon os into a virtual machine window now after a few seconds you should be showing this screen which is the dragon os desktop now once we run dragon os from the iso file we can either use it as is or we can run the dragon os installer if you do not run the installer then any changes you make to your dragon os will be lost after you shut down so it's advisable to run the installer by double clicking the link here now once the installer is finished simply reboot and you're good to go now dragon os contains quite a lot of sdr related applications some of them can be started from the menu as shown here and a fair few must be run from the command line now on this list we have direwolf which is a software packet tnc we have fldg which is a signal decoder we have gnu radio companion application g predict for satellite tracking qss tv for sstv decoding sdr plus plus which is a full-blown sdr application which incidentally runs on multiple operating systems we have sdr angel which is a great tool for decoding signals i'll show you more about this in detail shortly we also have wsjtx which can be used for decoding transmissions like ft8 and wspr or otherwise known as whisper now the other menu lists a whole load more applications and some of these links will just open a terminal window in the selected applications folder now this is because most of these will need to be ran from the command line all of these command line applications are located in a folder called src which is located in the usr folder as you can see here there are many applications that you can experiment with now even though dragon os has been designed to work offline i.e without internet i find it useful to search github or google for each of the applications listed here that you're interested in this is because most of these will require command lines to run and to find out the correct syntax the github page will be the best source of this information so the first command line tool i'm going to show you is dump vdl 2 which is a vdl mode 2 message decoder and protocol analyzer essentially these packets of information are sent from aircraft now further information on this particular tool and what it does can be found on the dump vdl 2 github page talking with the github page let's take a quick look to see the syntax that i will required to use this tool with an sdrplay sdr duo receiver so here on the github page i'm just going to find the syntax line and then copy it most of these will have examples now i will now paste this into the command line on dragon os and hopefully it should work as you can see there dump vdl2 is receiving and decoding some motor messages now the antenna that i'm using connected to my sdr play str duo is my dual band colliding mounted on my chimney which works quite well as these video messages are transmitted around 137 megahertz [Applause] so another application which is installed is sdr plus plus now this application can be run from the ham radio menu as shown earlier are there no command lines you need to type in so that makes it easier just click and it will run so that example there is just receiving some transmission from the air band sdr plus plots works just like any other sdr application when connected to an sdr receiver and in this case i was using my hack rf1 so how about decoding some ham radio digital modes let's say fta well with the use of sdr plus plus and wsjtx you can do just that without any other software needing to be installed grabbing the audio output from sdr plus plus to pipe into wsjtx is quite simple and just the case of selecting the correct sound card input within the wsjtx settings you can even set up hamlet rig control server on sdr plus plus and change bands directly from wsjtx however you will notice the big red rectangle which should be showing the correct frequency maybe it's a small bug but it works very well now another pre-installed command line application is gr air modes which can receive and decode mode s data from aircraft specifically it will decode and display traffic collision avoidance system messages which is actually quite interesting to read as they come in now strangely enough i haven't seen this software before so playing around with dragon os has already taught me something maybe i'll do a dedicated video on gr air modes in the near future out of interest i was using my hack rf1 and my dual band co-linear on the roof for receiving these signals now as you've probably gathered by now there are many cool pieces of software here that we can learn from while using it and it would take an absolute age to cover every application in this video plus i want to leave some applications for you to play around with yourself and figure out how to use them amongst the applications you'll find many on gsm decoding satellite decoding like iridium wireless devices located on 433 megahertz and even a decoder for digital cordless phones dect of course you also need to be mindful when using these applications because some of them could potentially require a license to use or still not be allowed to be used at all in your country now the last application i will show you is sdr angel and i'll only show you one of the hundreds of decoding features that it has in this example on the screen we are decoding adsb mode s position data from aircrafts we're then using the adsb plugin to show a list of received aircraft and even plot them on a map if you've not heard of sdr angel and you're really interested in sdr then i would definitely recommend taking some time to learn how to use it there are lots of different types of decoders supporting a wide range of modulation types and protocols for example lora aprs afsk you've even got some dat tv decoders for decoding digital tv well i hope you enjoyed this video and if you yourself have used dragon os before please share your experience with others by leaving a comment in the description below i'm definitely going to be spending some time playing around with all of the installed applications i'll also want to give a massive thanks to sema executor for putting this project together and maintaining it to a high standard until the next video guys take care stay safe thanks for watching and i'll see you in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Tech Minds

Views: 142,505

Keywords: ham, radio, software, defined, digital, dstar, dmr, fusion, ysf, nxdn, antenna, resonant, nanoVNA, how to make, how to, tutorial, waterfall, signal, transmission, qo-100, eshail2, tech minds, dragonos, spy, evesdrop, decode, crack, hack, hacking, hackrf, hackrf one, sdr, software defined radio, unbuntu, satellite

Id: lTBtlGGf5KE

Length: 11min 8sec (668 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 25 2021