Getting Started with the RTL-SDR (Software Defined Radio)

[Applause] what's going on guys today I just wanted to do a pretty much QuickStart guide to using the rtl-sdr and this is going to assume that you don't really know much about software-defined radio he's you never owned one so we're gonna start kind of from the basics so once you receive your device you're gonna have a few parts here the main thing you're gonna have is the actual dongle itself this is relatively simple basically this is the USB out to go to the computer this is your antenna port it's a call it sa ma adapter another thing you're gonna get is actual aunt Anna so ordinarily it comes about like this right here okay and you're gonna have two sets of antennas you can actually screw on to it you're gonna have the larger telescopic set that you see here and you're also going to have the smaller telescopic set that you see here both of these are useful in the fact that you need different sizes for your antenna to work with different frequencies so for today's demonstration purposes I'm gonna be using the bigger antennas because I'm gonna be doing some things in there to meter bands so this is that antenna and you just screw these on now there is a trick knowing the telescopic antenna there's a trick to it there's a lot of different modes and functions you can do with this antenna so it can increase and decrease in size so with the antenna theory the way it works is the smaller your antenna the higher the frequency or at resonating at the larger or longer antenna the lower the frequency so basically if you're down low like 50 megahertz hundred megahertz you want your antenna be Oh as long as possible now I'm gonna provide a link in the description I'm trying to cover all the hardware stuff before we actually plug it in but I'm gonna provide a link in the description for maintain a dipole calculator and that will show you basically the links that you need for each sides of this in order to resonate at your target frequency now say you like I want a frequency I'm listening for 140 I'll just punch in 140 and the frequency calculator there and put in dipole and it will show me at what length in inches each of these neat ends need to be for optimum listening for that frequency that doesn't mean that you can't listen to a hundred or 200 megahertz that but it's going to be best tuned to that frequency next thing I want to talk about is the ability not only to have it with this polarization like there's a straight dipole but you can actually bend these edges in to create different antenna configurations now as a beginner I would start out with just the regular straight across but as you get more advanced you'll learn that different encana configurations are more efficient at different situations for example the inverted V antenna facing the horizon is really good for nno NOAA satellites and satellite reception whereas your basic up-and-down straight across is really good for earthbound our earth ground station communications so once you have a proper antenna configuration or you can do this later all you have to do this is screw in that SMA connector into the dongle like so and the hardware is pretty much set up now your antennas going to come with different types of mounts and stuff so you can put on Windows and grip it into walls and stuff like that unfortunately I do not have mine anymore but if you do decide to do that one cool tip is this black sheet on the antenna will actually pop off and you're actually able to see the resistor there are the capacitor sorry and see which way it's facing you want that to be facing down the capacitor there you want that to be facing down the ground is down so that will help a little bit better with reception so anyways we're going to go ahead and move on to the computer side two things and this is assuming that you haven't plugged in your dongle yet and you haven't done any type of configuration on the computer so we're gonna go ahead and move over there and get that set up and with the bug with SDR sharp so we can do the spectrum out and listen listen to different frequencies and that type of thing alright so here we are on the computer side of things and the first thing that we're going to do is go ahead and set up two drivers for our dongle so first we're gonna start out by going to the website that I had here air spy comm I'm going to provide a link down below and you're gonna go to the the downloads page right so once we're on the downloads page you want to look for the windows SDR software package there should be here up at the top so we're gonna go ahead and hit the download button here and it's going to be a zip file so you'll need software on your computer to unzip that we're gonna go ahead and open it up and you're going to need to extract this to a folder okay this might look a little bit different from what you have I have WinRAR so it's a different program but it's all the same you need to extract so if you might have to right-click the file on your system and extract it you might have to open it and extract it but you'll extract it and I'm just going to extract it to my downloads slash SDR sharp and hit OK I've already done this before so I'm just gonna yes - all on this and it should have created a new folder in your downloads that is called STR sharp so here's my STR sharp folder and from here while you'll want to do is there should be a file called install rtl-sdr okay it's a bat file so you're going to open that up and a command prompts going to open now it should download a program called z a TIG okay this should pop up here after you run that bat file what you want to do now is right click actually what what you want to do now is just go ahead and plug in your dongle so go ahead and just take the USB side of your dongle and plug it into any USB port on your computer all right so after you plug in your rtl-sdr into your computer you're going to give your computer just a few minutes to finish its automatic driver installation in case there is one that way it doesn't cause any interference with what we're about to do so once you have that plugged in I would wait about 60 seconds you're going to right click the zài di g file that was created and you're going to hit run as administrator and open that up now the first thing that you want to do once you open this up is go to options and list all devices in some Windows 10 cases you might also have to uncheck ignore hubs or composite parents but mine's automatically uncheck or check so I'm going to go ahead and check now I keep that check the next thing you want to do is you're going to select bulk in interface interface 0 so this is the bulkan interface interface 0 you see here right do not select the USB receiver interface 0 or interface 1 or anything else because you could overwrite a driver for another device so the next thing that you want to do is double check that your USB ID says 0 BD a 2 8 3 8 0 0 that means you've selected the correct device ok anything other than that it's probably wrong so the next thing you want to do is make sure that you have ensure that the you have to ensure that the windows when USB is selected so as you can see it is selected and since already have it installed I'm having a reinstall driver button here next you need to disc lick reinstall driver or replace driver whatever button is here you'll just hit the button there it says the driver was installed successfully on some pcs you might get a error saying the warning has not been verified because the driver isn't signed you'll just have to click YES on so once you once you have done that you can just go ahead and close out za i di g za di g and we're gonna go ahead and open SDR sharp so this is a program here located here and this is the program that pretty much is the official spectrum analyzer for the RTL SDR so you'll go ahead and run as administrator and it's going to go ahead and open up okay so the first thing that you want to do is change the source from air spy and you're going to change that to the rtl-sdr USB so you should see that here and nothing's going to be here until you hit the play button so once the play button is hits you're going to notice that there's a spectrum the spectrum pops up for the radio spectrum and there's a lot of different things that you can do here so once you're in the waterfall spectrum display here there's audio coming down you can adjust the volume button here the first thing that we're going to do is set up or gain control so you're going to hit this cog watch here cog wheel whatever you want to call it you actually have to disable the receiver first and we're going to go ahead and have our device chosen it should be 0 or 1 I think say it gave me 1 now that I've reinstalled the driver so your sampling rate it's going to take more processing power for the higher it is and there's different types of sampling modes you'll need like direct sampling if you're going lower to the HF regions but there's a few options here and your this is more like a you know just tweak and see what works for you because there's not a definite setting for everything but are your best bet is to just I mean unless there's combating signals it doesn't hurt to turn your RF gain all the way up but you can also do like an automatic gain control so you'll do a tuner automatic gain control and that will handle pretty much the gain for to you you're going to notice if you do the automatic gain control its see we have a signal here and this is actually a radio station so that's pretty cool but you're going to notice the higher your gain is the higher the signals are going to be but also the higher the noise floor is going to be so you can adjust this how you like and just try to choose different settings what works for you or whatever signal you're looking for so the next thing you're going to look at here is you have different types of modes for your audio that's coming out okay so W FM is why 2 FM n FM is narrow FM which is basically like for your ham your hand signals stuff like that but another thing you're going to notice is once you change frequencies you can scroll through the spectrum like this and that's fine but you can also click the numbers and this takes some getting used to but if you click the number it will change it'll drop if you right click it like jumps but if you select what you want to do is select that first digit in the mega hurt region here and then you can go from there and type in the frequency you want and then hit the enter button and you'll bring you straight there so that's one way to do it and you can also click on the spectrum and hold your mouse in and drag and you can change your frequency that way too so just an example I'm gonna find the weather the weather alert which I think it's around 160 here this is probably it right here so narrow FM's not covering it here so what we can do is manually increase the bandwidth and as you can hear it is we can hear the weather NOAA weather broadcast like that now if you zero in on it you can you can filter out some of that static but you can also use the preset filters here upper sideband lower sideband we have AM we have cwo Morse code raw and there's this different types of things that you can do here so your squelch is basically a set to where it won't play the audio unless certain signal as is present like a certain powerful signal so you won't hear all that staticky when you're waiting on idle you can turn that up and play with it as well the next thing you want to look at is your your audio tab and it basically it's pretty straightforward to edit the settings you have to stop it but you can choose the different output device with a different speaker or something if you'd like to do that your AG C is settings for your automatic gain control you can do there is a setting for audio noise reduction I don't recommend if you're decoding digital signals there's more if' noise reduction based by a noise blanker the basic the basic premise is the same so one thing this you want to try to pay attention to is a recording tab now once you open the recording tab you can select the sample format which I think 16-bit a pretty basic standard what you want to pay attention to is what you have checked here because you can record audio baseband or either or so if you're actually trying to playback whatever signal that you hear like actually be able to hear it you'll need to make sure that audio is checked if you're just trying to record say the spectrum or a digital signal or something that you want to decode then you'll want the baseband to be checked and that pretty much you'll hit the record button if you like to record something but that pretty much covers it the rest is up to this kind of playing around and seeing what you want to do if you want to start by just hearing some sounds you can go round one hundred megahertz and check out the wide FM radio stations so that's pretty cool and you can actually see those on the the spectrum just like that and then you can go up from around the hand bands on the two meter and you can go up to 140 around 144 and these also has the what band you're in right now too so that's really cool that you're able to see that you're able to see I can't kind of what you're listening to now it's experimental but you can go down below into the HF bands you can type in round zero start around zero 30 and each of these little Peaks is some type of signal it could be a digital signal but we're not actually in a band right now as you can tell but once we start moving across here are antennas very small right now so we're not gonna pick up a lot of signals over this way but it's basically from here on out it's just playing around experimentation and once you get the hang of this program there's a lot of different things that you can do if you guys like this video make sure you subscribe rate and comment the next thing I'm going to do is just go about piping some the audio furnace into different programs for decoding like weather satellite images and this and that anyways this is really this meant to be a Quick Start Guide and get you started and kind of show you how the basics how to install the driver and use the software that comes with it if you guys liked the video make sure you subscribe make sure you comment below if there's something else that you guys wanted to see or if you have any feedback on what I did wrong in the video let me know so I can correct it next time anyways 73

Channel: ModernHam

Views: 252,482

Keywords: rtlsdr, rtl-sdr, getting started, software defined radio, noaa, decoding sstv, SDRSharp

Id: C01wLvwjLIs

Length: 18min 33sec (1113 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 31 2019