The Coolest Radio You've Probably Never Heard Of

did you know that for under 40 bucks you can pick up a portable lightweight radio that you can take just about anywhere and listen to just about anything stick around and i'll introduce you to the coolest radio you've probably never heard of [Music] [Applause] hey everyone tom the dilettante here hope you're all doing well you know there's still a lot of great stuff i want to do with the crosstrek but there's no room in my garage shop right now and the weather outside just sucks so as a dabbler in many things i figured i'd pick up where i left off a couple weeks ago and continue sharing with you some of the cool things i find about the radio hobby now i'm pretty new to the radio hobby myself and if you were to ask me what the coolest radio i own is that would be a tough one is it these versatile little gmrs frs handhelds that i can toss to pretty much anyone and get comms up and running no it's got to be some ham gear right what's cooler than the ubiquitous baofeng uv5r the workhorse of the entry-level ham maybe it's one of my mobile rigs this kenwood tmv71a that i use as a base station or the yaesu ftm-400xd mounted in the crosstrek how about a nice hf rig and a 20-foot antenna that allows me to communicate around the world for my garage those are all cool and all but i think the coolest radio i own as a newbie is this little guy this is an sdr or software defined radio dongle i picked this thing up from amazon for about 35 bucks and with this thing my laptop and some free software i can listen to just about anything from my garage seriously i'm sitting here in my garage with this thing in my laptop and i'm listening to local radio stations we all need a place to relax and unwind air traffic control from a nearby airport wisconsin 3853 contact chicago pro 24.35 local police and ems communications three shots right in the vicinity third district zone five clear and ham radio traffic delta niner mike actually victor and you are tuned in to see if you've seen i watch sdrs do just about everything a regular radio does except transmit you can use this thing to listen to a variety of frequencies and remember there's no license required to just listen this particular sdr i got from amazon for about 35 bucks it's called the rtl sdr blog v3 and it comes with all the hardware you need to get started it comes with the sdr dongle itself a portable dipole antenna t with two pairs of extendable whips a suction cup mount and a small tripod not sure why it comes with a tripod presumably it's to mount the antenna in a horizontal orientation but i've never used it that way yet anyway in addition to this kit you're going to need some sdr software the dongle captures the radio signals and converts them into digital modes for your computer but the software performs all the demodulation filtering and signal enhancement needed for you to actually listen to the stuff i use a program called sdr sharp it's free to download and very feature rich i'll be leaving a link to the parts software and reference videos that i use to get started in the description below now using this thing is quite simple but there's a few critical things to keep in mind when you start setting this thing up for the first time now i'm not an rt guy but as i understand it if you misinstall the drivers for this thing one you're not going to be able to use it and two you might screw up the usb drivers on your computer so rather than risk leading you astray with my non-i.t advice i'm going to advise you to do what i did to get started i followed these awesome instructions from this video by the smoking ape and it got me up and running on the first try so if you're going to give this thing a shot i highly recommend watching his video before you get started okay i'm going to assume you've watched or are going to watch those videos on how to properly install the sdr dongle and what we're going to get to right now is how to actually use the darn thing first thing you're going to need to do is set up your antenna and the first part you're going to need to do that is this dipole antenna t now there's a couple tricks to setting this thing up right so let's get a closer look at this thing under the gopro for starters let's take a look underneath this cover when you pull this cover off you're going to notice that the coaxial here splits off into two directions the center conductor splits in one direction and the shielding ground splits off in the other you want the center conductor to be pointing up on your dipole this dipole is going to be set up in a vertical configuration so what we're going to do is we're just going to go ahead and mark this somehow with the grease pencil so we know which way is up and put our cover back on the next thing you're going to want to do is calculate what length you want to make your antenna and that's going to depend on what frequency that you want to listen to for our example we're going to set up our antenna for the 2 meter handband or right around 146 megahertz now to calculate the length of a dipole antenna it's a simple formula the length in feet of your dipole antenna is 468 divided by the frequency you want to tune it to in megahertz so for example if i want to listen to 146 megahertz i'm going to take 468 divided by 146 and that gives us the length of the dipole in feet we're going to multiply that again by 12 to get it in inches and then we're going to divide it by 2 to find out the length in inches of each end of the dipole in our example it's about 19 and a quarter inches for each leg of the dipole so grab your tape measure grab a dipole leg and we're going to go ahead and measure it out so that each leg is about 19 and a quarter inches you're going to do that for each width of the dipole and then when you're done go ahead and screw it into the dipole t now the nice thing about this dipole t is that it has a standard quarter by 20 fitting and since i'm just putting around in the garage i'm going to use this small rig clamp screw it in and clamp it to a post that i've got here in the garage next unravel your antenna cable and plug it into the dipole connect the other end of the cable into your sdr dongle plug the dongle into your computer and launch your software in this case sdr sharp okay i know what you might be thinking that's a lot of complicated stuff installing software plugging in a dongle measuring out an antenna for god's sake it's really not that bad those 19 and a quarter inch measurements that i gave you will let you hear pretty much anything sure you can fine-tune your antenna depending on what frequency you want to listen to but to be honest to get started the measurements that i gave you i'll let you hear just about anything so let's jump into the software that defines the software defined radio there's no way in hell i'm going to be able to cover everything in here so the intent of this video is to really just wet your appetite and send you down the rabbit hole like me into exploring this thing and all it has to offer so when you open the software you're going to see this screen it's quite intimidating but bear with me once you've got everything set up all you really need to do to start receiving the radio signals is hit play and the first important menu i want to bring you to is just this radio menu and here you're going to have options for the different modulations like narrow fm wide fm am or amplitude modulation lower sideband upper sideband morse code and so forth for most things that you're going to listen to it's going to be narrow or wide fm or am right now we've got too much of this static so we're going to go and turn our squelch on and we're going to raise the squelch up until the static disappears all right so we got a lot of stuff going on here let's start with something we're probably all familiar with i'm going to tune into a local radio station and to do that you can either click up or down on these things here so if i want one oh five nine going in as well the blackhawks will live in detroit tomorrow the bulls will host detroit you'll get a radio broadcast so let me pause this for a second so we can see what we're looking at so this waveform is going to show you the signal strength across the part of the spectrum that you're looking at and on the bottom here we're going to see that we're on the fm broadca broadcast spectrum i've got signals here and here and if i want to i can go ahead and move this whole thing over left and right while it's playing so let's go ahead and turn on the play again we're going to turn down the volume and if you left click and just kind of hold you can scroll back and forth up and down the fm frequency spectrum over here you can zoom in and out so if you want a closer look at a particular waveform and to select you can either hover over this waveform click on it or you can even go down to what we call the waterfall chart and click on it this waterfall chart is super helpful because basically it's painting a picture for you where the signals are the strongest and right now there's a lot of noise i've got a very high noise floor here and so in order to raise the contrast of this i'm going to lower this down some so that everything else is in the dark and only my strong waves come through you guys following so far basically it's just a visual representation of the radio spectrum and the signals that are coming through now here's where the fun part begins you can look up any frequency of anything of interest whether that's the noaa weather frequencies that you might get on a ham radio or a gmrs radio heck you can go ahead and tune in to gmrs and frs frequencies you can tune into the 2 meter and 70 centimeter ham frequencies and so on to get started i recommend checking out this site radioreference.com from here you can look up things like your local municipality frequencies your ems frequencies fire department police department and if they're publicly available and not digitally encrypted you can tune in and listen to them believe it or not in chicago i can listen to all the city-wide police frequencies radio reference will also allow you to look up things like local airport frequencies so you can tune into things like tower ground and approach and once you tune into those frequencies you can actually save them as a favorite much like you would on a web browser so check this out i've already saved some favorites and you're going to find that here under frequency manager and under frequency manager for example i've got the gmrs ems local repeaters and even noaa weather stations i click on that you can double click on one of those frequencies and you can see they pop up here as highlighted vertical bars these are my saved channels now if i want to zoom in on these i can go ahead and zoom in and let's go ahead and turn it up that was a bad one springfield and one at bloomington it was partly cloudy with a temperature of 12 at waukegan and six in kankakee so basically you've just turned your computer into a scanner so i don't know about you but i can spend hours on this thing armed with this setup and the internet in order to look up different frequencies you can just start tuning around and using that waterfall chart all you really got to do is navigate left and right and look for a signal click on it if you're curious and start listening it's a little orwellian maybe even a little creepy but i think it's cool okay honestly we've only scratched the surface of what software defined radio has to offer and the purpose of this video was really just to introduce you to the concept and the fact that it exists and hopefully wet your appetite to start learning more it's extremely low entry barrier at only 35 bucks and if you already have a laptop you're good to go so check out the links i put in the description below for some additional resources and go nuts so i hope you liked this video and i hope i've inspired some of you to delve into this whole software-defined radio thing i think it's super fascinating and i think some of you might as well too so thank you for watching if you've got any questions or comments please leave them below as always i'll do my best to answer questions to the best of my ability and until next time this is tom the dilettante happy exploring on sdr and i'll catch you next time [Music] you

Channel: Tom the Dilettante

Views: 432,834

Rating: 4.9352403 out of 5

Keywords: sdr, sdr radio, software defined radio

Id: h4x7cGALaC8

Length: 11min 54sec (714 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 17 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/melted13]

Well, the title is hugely misleading. This is not 2015 anymore, SDR receivers are widely popular and known now....

[u/VTXGaming]

You mean the coolest radio everyone and their grandma has heard of

[u/swineytide]

What'll they come up with next, electric cars?

[u/LameBMX]

Man I hate to point it out, but SDR was part of the tech exam last year.

[u/fr0ntsight]

RTL-SDR Saved you 11 minutes

[u/silasmoeckel]

Can we get a rule that no text transcript no video?

[u/diamaunt]

This is is just a scumbag shilling youtube for views to get ad revenue for his channel.

Nothing new, or interesting here. (SDR)