Quick Start Guide to RTLSDR and HDSDR Install for Receive Only

well hi everybody this is Stu ag6 AG and I'm here to do a quick tutorial on how to get the rtl-sdr dongle setup first thing let's take a look this is the rtl-sdr dongle this is version 3 this is the one that I recommend this is about Oh 18 to 20 dollars typically on Amazon and that's with Prime that's delivered so this would be the unit that I find is easiest because it already has the direct sampling hat done to it from the factory anyway you'll get this in the mail this is all that comes and let's go through the installation really quick so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to pop up to the Internet and I am going to search for SDR or excuse me RTL SDR and I'll come up to the RTL that very top one in my case is the software-defined radio the RTL SDR comm site I'm gonna go ahead and click on software and supported software and there's a couple of different things that I'm going to need to download by the way this is just an advertisement still as as always stay away from any advertisements that run in your way so the SDR sharp is very popular however it doesn't interface with radios so I'm going to go ahead and I want to install the HD SD our software now it has a official installation instructions manual and that's where we want to go and this happens to be a PDF really the reason that I'm going here is I want to pop up here and I want to install the zadig installer software this is actually designed to replace the USB driver for the rtl-sdr with one that actually works with the software and with the dongles we we want to use it so we're going to download the latest version and that's gonna end up in our download we're not there run that yet alright but we're going to go back here to our PDF and we're gonna go down and we're going to download the latest installer and we're also going to download the RTL DLL that will be used as the driver so let's go ahead and we'll grab this that is the HD SD our install and then we'll grab this now this is in a grumble a little bit because it is a DLL you want to keep it it's basically grumbling because it is a link library and it could be used a peroneus Lee let's just say for bad guys so again if you've got any problems with installing this stuff or whatever I recommend that you read through the documentation but if you want to run the RTL SDR dongle you're going to need to use these drivers anyway that gets us to that point we have our stuff downloaded now we're going to go through the install process now I recommend that you read through the PDF that we were just in to give a general idea what you're doing and make sure there aren't any individual issues or other things that may be of concern while we're doing this we are now going to take the RTL dongle and I'm going to plug it into a USB port on this laptop and you see that it's setting up a device now it's gonna set the device up with the driver that's available for Windows however that's the wrong driver that is not going to work with the software installing so we're going to have to run the tzaddik software and we're going to go ahead and say run and there we go alright so what we're going to do now is we're gonna go under options we're going to list all devices and what we're looking for is either bulk interface one or possibly something else in here but it looks like bulk interface 0 will be the one that we need and what we're going to do you see that the current driver that it has we're going to change it to the wind USB driver we're gonna go ahead and replace the driver and the driver was successfully installed so that is now the current driver we can also by the way select the bulk device to up nope we want bulk in device one and let's see if it let's just keep that and then we are going to go ahead and also replace the driver for that alright there we go so that's all taken care of all right let's go ahead and close this I'm going to unplug the rtl-sdr and I'm going to plug it back in like so alright now I'm gonna go ahead and run the HD SDR installer and again it wants to know if I want to run it and I'm gonna say yes it's gonna ask for my approval and then I'm going to accept their agreement and I'm just gonna take the defaults here and I want to create a shortcut on the desktop and there we go and we're not gonna launch the program yet okay and you'll see in a minute why now we need to do another thing here remember that DLL we're gonna go ahead and copy it right and we are going to go down to our PC and remember we installed this in here and we need to actually put it in the Program Files so again what I did is I went to this PC I selected my C Drive I selected the Program Files x86 where we defaulted the install - and here's the HD SDR this is the program directory itself I'm going to right hand mouse click and say paste it's gonna ask if I want to continue and there we go so we now have that in the directory okay so at this point we have installed the software and we can go ahead let's launch it and then we are we have it up and working so we can verify that we're gonna quit by clicking here and you can see that we actually are connected to the Archaea and we can make changes all right so we're gonna take a break now I'm gonna walk be back in just a second because I need to look at intended to this in order to continue farther all right well remember when I just said antenna this is what we put up to go ahead and calibrate and demonstrate this is a 20 meter dipole that is a loaded dipole in other words there's lots of windings in it to get it short so we can do 20 meters and it's sitting right at about 18 feet right now anyway we're gonna go on in now and check everything out all right so just to give you a general idea we're gonna use this antenna tuner to try to get the best signal possible because let's face it we got a compromised antenna in the air we've got really lousy propagation right now so this is just audio tuned or tuned for best reception and let's go ahead and move on over to the computer okay so let's go ahead and launch HD SDR oh let's turn that volume down there we go first things first let's go ahead and fullscreen this little Don make a little easier on the eyes there we go and let's go ahead and enable direct sampling mode now we're going to do that by going over here to ext IO this blue box here and we're gonna pull up the DLL Settings box and we see over here HF direct sampling we're gonna go on this pull down and we're going to select Q output and we're also going to turn on down here in the bottom RTL Auto gain control we can go ahead and shut that for now now what we need to do is we need to calibrate this they're all pretty close but if you're like me you want it pretty much rock on so I'm gonna switch over to AM mode I'm gonna go over here to my local oscillator I'm going to click on here see where it says ello a I'm just gonna click on it there it's going to pull up an entry window and I am going to let's see I want to put the local oscillator slightly off the frequency I want to tune to because I'm gonna get noise out of the local oscillator that will eventually correct itself after we get a bunch of stuff warmed up and stuff like that but for right now let's go ahead and work on that basis so I'm gonna go ahead and rather than set it to 15 megahertz to get the clock signal I'm gonna send it to 14 oh let's do 990 all right we're just gonna go 10 kilohertz off of off of our target now let's go ahead and adjust our tuner and we can do that with the mouse I'm just going to click here on 15 and I need to go up just a little there we go up back a little actually let me zoom this in I am going to zoom this in to where I can get right on 15 like that there we go all right so I'm on 15 I've set to wreck sampling mode I'm slightly offset you see this red line here is an interference line that I'm getting and that's from the oscillator itself I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna adjust out the zoom just a little farther right so I get a little bit better view and I'm gonna go over here and I am gonna go ahead and set the scaling up to where if there's a smaller scale so I can see more and I'll probably crank this down just a little bit right my zero there we go my lower floor alright that looks actually pretty good I can also if I want all right I can basically select select this and remove my averaging will turn averaging off there beautiful all right so I'm starting to see something there let's turn our volume up and see what we have so I'm not sure if you can hear it or not [Applause] it's the tone time all right so it's back our volume back down so we know that we're really close let's zoom in a little farther and see if we're off really at all and it looks like well we're off a little and you probably can't see it on this camera angle so let me move the camera up so you can see very slight but we are off okay so where do we fix that well we're going to go back over to our extended IO setup ext IO and we're gonna go to our frequency correction and we're going to watch this and that's just a little hot so I am going to crank it down just a little bit we're going to watch this and I am going to click it Oh see it moved a little that's actually pretty good and that's a little too far so I think right there is perfect it was only one off that's really good alright so we've got that set let's see if I can get this camera repositioned okay alright so we got that set we can go ahead and close that now we should be able to of course hear that hear the times so now we're going to go down here we're going to zoom this just a little bit down at the bottom cuz all not to see I want to see there should be an audio tone that comes up right here at a thousand Hertz so we are and I might have this shat upright but we're getting on here so I'm good with that so I'm gonna zoom back and let's get back frequency that actually is going to look for us I'm actually gonna use the math here and I'm going to adjust this down to 14 490 which puts me at 14 500 and let's switch to up to sideband and I'm 20 meters and I am gonna zoom back in a little bit right here to put ourselves at [Applause] there we go 14 we go to 14 350 oh wait I mean that's what my problem is let's go let's go all the way down to 4 okay let's go all the way to 240 there we go that's better silly me no justice back out I want to did it show up at the top side I'm at 14 350 so that's pretty much set up now and that actually looks pretty good let me turn that volume down boy that's all right all right now all I am going to go over in I had tuned it so it would look better at 15 and he hit the tune of a manual here because antenna actually is tuned for these frequencies let me spread out my audio waterfall a little bit there we go all right the rest of this actually looks pretty good speed looks good I could crank the speed up a little more I liked it a little faster Yanis it quiet out there but as it looks things look pretty good I can adjust the spectrum out a little bit this is actually to get a little bit better idea what's going on plus I can adjust the waterfall out to be a little more sensitive okay so I'm not really seeing a letter L with you anything out there yeah it would figure there'd be nothing on the on the bands when I did this there's a living there barely here pretty weak vault it's something so now it's written and we can go play with all sorts of other fun stuff in here if we want to of course we can adjust our Auto games fresh hold up or bring it down that whatever we're looking at doing we can also turn it down and if we want to we can go in here and sawed off our auto game while here the scriptures a bit more control over what we're doing right oh yeah and of course we can doctor with a writer for oh man get it back to every morning that's actually looking pretty good alright so let's see we're trying this down a few more settings that I wanted to let you know about of course you've got some filters some other stuff here but under options you are going to want to go to calibration and you want to want to go to DC removal here and select iír high bypass auto you of course can select contrast as well I like the auto because I work less when I'm doing that we don't really have an issue with channel calibration we don't need to put in phase or delays right now our s meter we don't have a comparison so we're gonna run with where it's set and of course this we're just gonna leave alone alright say ok and I think that's it that gives us something general to play with other things you may want to do I'll just bring this up really quick under miscellaneous options you can say tune fix to ello but what you really want to do here is show UTC time over on the side right so you can see what time these things came in then also we can go down here to mouse wheel and we want it to be mode tune so when we spin the wheel it Tunes it did we find something there maybe as time goes on the band toes in and out so let's see what this is well and I don't have a transmitter set up that's a shame alright so let's see here back to our options go back to our mouse wheel and our step I like to have my step at about fifty kilohertz so when I'm spinning the mouse wheel it's moving at about fifty kilohertz but that's just me you can set it to whatever you want you can see here also that we're seeing some of the audio pattern going on what's actually going on this is really great if you're trying to isolate where noises to set a filter so it works really well anyway this is actually looking pretty good alright and we sent our AGC too fast I think we're all set alright so I hope you liked the demonstration and I hope that work well for you fairly fast tutorial on how to set this up have fun with it in the future I'm going to try to post something on how you can actually use this in conjunction with your radio and control your radio by clicking on locations like this and changing the actual radio frequency and using this as a full-fledged pan adapter for your HF ring anyway thank you so much for joining me for the video any questions or comments please send me an email at stu that's Sierra tango uniform at a g6 AG org thanks for watching

Channel: Stuart Sheldon

Views: 102,382

Keywords: SDR Dongle, HDSDR, RTLSDR, Amateur Radio, Ham Radio

Id: 84urIZ7hKGg

Length: 22min 52sec (1372 seconds)

Published: Wed May 09 2018