Get started with Software Defined Radio SDR for $20

hey what's happening guys got something interesting for us to play with today if you're not in the radios I understand if you want to skip this video but it is very electronics related it's this guy right here this is the RTL SDR comm this SDR stands for software-defined radio and what this little device here is it's a USB dongle plugs into your PC and with a bit of software it allows your PC to become a very powerful high frequency which some folks call shortwave as long as v8 as well as VHF and uhf receiver very cool very low cost this is available for about $20 from Amazon and I'll post the link down below as you can see here this model is called the r8 2-0 T 2 and it's got 8 TC X so that is a temperature-controlled crystal oscillator and it also includes the HF bands I don't know how well it's going to do the HF bands because that is largely dependent on the length of your antenna so let's zoom out here a little bit because not only do you get the dongle you get in antenna now in its shortened position here less than a foot long this is a magma antenna this screws on here and you can adjust this link a couple of things that you want to keep in mind when doing this though alright the first thing is these magma bases I've read online and mine turned out to be the case may have a broken ground lead from the factory so you definitely want to check to make sure that your magnet on the bottom connects electrically to the outer part of this SMA connector which is the grounded part so I fixed it and you can see that that works secondly you're going to need a ground plane these were made to put on a car but for our purposes today we're going to use this nice stainless steel disc here pop that on there like that and then once again we're going to check to make sure that we have a good ground connection can you see that we don't so I'm gonna have to do something about that okay when I had to take this apart to fix it I had to remove the copper foil that was on the bottom and the magnet wasn't quite making contact so I just put a new layer of copper tape now just this stuff quarter inch wide copper tape really chief stuff good to have in your kit and now just poke myself with my very sharp probe master probes now if we test we have a good and thorough ground so our hardware is pretty much ready to go the other thing is this is a telescoping antenna you're going to want to match this to 1/2 the wavelength for a dipole but we'll get into that in a few minutes let's look at the software next all right so for the software which is free you're just going to go to WWE TLS dr.com and I'll link that down below so you don't have to worry about it when you get there click on the Quick Start Guide and come on down here and we'll come to the section called SDR whoops why don't you keep doing that Str set-up guide blah blah blah and it'll tell you time we're going to come down here to air spy comm and that's what we're going to get our software alright so air spy calm we're going to click on download core tools windows SDR software package download it and that's about it now if we go to the QuickStart guide here any little information on how it works but we'll get into that one thing to be aware of you are going to have to have the dotnet framework installed so if you don't have the dotnet framework installed could be a little problem there now back over here this is the back to the RTL SDR page we're going to extract the SDR sharp to a folder and double click the Install rtl-sdr bet so let's get there okay so we're there I'm gonna run it as administrator and it says it's downloading the driver from host OS MOC OEM calm downloading is a dig which is the driver we need ok so that's done I only took a few seconds our next step is what plug in the dongle alright we will do that next ok so I plugged in the dongle and it says the software was not successfully installed which is fine now we need to go back to the folder where we unzip the SDR spice or the SDR sharp software and finds a dig dot exe so that's our next stop ok we're gonna double click the Zeitung that says list all devices ok that is not the device we want we want bulk in interface zero and we said make sure it has the win USB Driver listed here and install the driver so we are installing the driver what I like to install this well sure sounds like a fun plan to install it I know this seems like there's a lot going on here but I don't think it's too bad if we just follow along it's been going for about three minutes so it's taking it's a good old time but it does keep coming up with some interesting messages here every few seconds they switch to something else it does say that it has a five minute time out there so how was your day well my day would be great if this works well that certainly isn't good I don't know what's going on but uh I guess we'll find out in 15 seconds well it turns out all I needed to do was restart everything and it worked just fine so anyway we're going to give this a try and the first thing I'm going to do is try a local FM station which will probably be picked up with this but we're going to do a dipole 103.5 so in inches we're looking at two feet 3.1 inches so 27 inches and I'm just going to use my tape measure here and set this to 27 inches and next we're going to go over to the computer and fire up the software okay so here's the software running and over here on the left side of the screen is our control panel we want to make sure that we're choosing rtl-sdr USB now over here we have our modes let me get pencil again here this is narrowband FM AM lower sideband upper side been wideband FM which is what broadcast is dual side been continuous wave which is Morse code and raw so I'm going to make sure that the volume is all the way down so I don't play any copyrighted material on the local station is 103.5 megahertz and we'll hit start now what you can see here is the display and I know this probably seems confusing so I'm going to explain it to you okay this area here well nevermind let me try it again this area here is your spectrum analyzer display so what we're seeing here is the spectrum of frequencies from 102.25 Oh up to a little bit beyond 103.7 and you see we have a spike here then we come down here to this lower area right here this is called our waterfall display this axis what you've drawn my air of the wrong way is time this axis is intensity of the signal okay now we have zoo we have contrast we have range we have offset so we can adjust things here see how our frequency display works there the way we adjust these things we can get see how we're zoomed right in and then we can zoom out and if we want to hear this particular signal all we have to do is click on it let's see I'm going to turn it up for just a second there you heard it I don't want a copyright strike now we can scroll through here and look for other signals now you see how we see a signal right here there's not much to it and if we click there it'll bring it out so we can go through all sorts of things local repeaters everything we can even go up to - you know into the gigahertz so there's 2.5 2.4 gigahertz and it tells you here what the different bands are and we can also go down lower and or let's go to like 28 megahertz see what we're seeing here 28 megahertz is the CB band and there's nothing much going on there now you see we have the 10 centimeter ham band now there's something here which is probably a digital signal you guys hear that that's probably packet radio and you can scroll all the way through all of the different bands until you find a signal that you want to listen to and as you scroll up through here it'll tell you what the different bands are another signal but not much going on they're probably digital you can get police and fire aircraft just about anything you can imagine if you put your antenna outside and put it up pretty high you can probably pick up a lot of stations that's another digital signal so that is working pretty good and one of the things you'll notice if we come back here was that one signal out there was it at break down here so there's our digital signal and it's at forty nine point nine nine seven megahertz and if we come over here to our modes it automatically switches for us and tells us we're listening in the upper sideband we're going to be getting into a lot more interesting stuff here pretty soon with radios but this is just the beginning just something to uh something to whet your appetite and show you how easy it is to get started with something like this alright so that's it for today I hope you guys enjoyed this if you did give me a thumbs up feel free to comment share and don't forget to subscribe big thanks to all my patrons and this thing was purchased with my own money there's no sponsorship involved here hate that I have to keep saying stuff like that but that's what I guess some people want to hear anyway I'm out peace you

Channel: learnelectronics

Views: 99,692

Rating: 4.8038149 out of 5

Keywords: Get started with Software Defined Radio SDR for $20, sdr, rtl-sdr

Id: -KtE0ssCRXg

Length: 16min 14sec (974 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 17 2018