Using the RTL-SDR dongle with the SDRSharp

hi this is Robert cane and for ixt in this presentation we'll take a look at the rtl-sdr dongle with SDR sharp software I've been an amateur radio operator since 1999 and currently hold an amateur extra class license I'm also an AR RL life member professionally I'm the owner of arcane training consulting working as a trainer in the Microsoft IT space check out our can code me for more information so what is SDR well SDR is software-defined radio many of you may have seen this in various radios such as the ones from Flex systems in this case we're going to implement a software-defined radio using a simple inexpensive dongle that will receive radio be clear this is only receive it doesn't transmit now the SBR in the name of this particular unit comes from software-defined radio the RTL comes for the chipset number as you can see in the image it uses the RTL 2832 u chipset so where do you get your radio from well the simplest place is from Amazon you can see the bitly link bit RTL - SPR and this particular unit has both the dongle and several antennas you can also buy just the number for about $20 but as you can see for 2695 it's a very small investment now once your dongle arrives don't plug it up yet there are several other things that we need to cover before you go start plugging things in one of those is your antenna system there are several options that you have first if you get the unit that I just showed it actually comes with a little base a set of rapid ears and a little tripod that you can mount it on this is sufficient to get a lot of frequencies and say that 2 meter band or 440 or other similar amateur radio bands it also works quite well to pick up commercial FM and AM radio you can also use an external antenna here I have a fairly old scanner antenna I picked up at RadioShack many many years ago attached to a pole scanner antennas are pretty inexpensive it's a little hard to see in the picture but it's there at the top and I've got a couple of zip ties poking out just so I can get an idea of what direction the winds coming in now what if you want to pick up some longer wavelengths well to access some of the HF bands you're going to need to have longer antennas than with a little rabbit ear steel you so for those you can use these little rollup antennas these rollup antennas are under ten dollars apiece and they're really designed for shortwave radios however they also work quite well with this particular application you just have a pair of them and you clip them onto the short antennas that come with the RTL SDR kit then you simply unroll them to whatever length you need here's another example of an antenna as a ham radio operator you may like to operate portable this is the MFJ 16 90 90 which receives all bands from 80 through 10 meters of course if you have an existing antenna on your property such as a dipole a large Yankee antenna or pretty much any type of antenna that will receive signals you can hook that up and use it as well it's important to keep your gear organized as you get into rtl-sdr here it'll quickly accumulate little pieces things that you want to keep together and organized I found a little inexpensive Plano tackle box at my available big-box Mart and it was about $7 it neatly organizes everything that I have as you can see in the image the rtl-sdr dongle is in here several longer extension cords some adapters on the right side we have the roller pin as well as the little bass do note I had to make one little modification to the box in order to get in the longer rabbit ear style antennas I had it trimmed just a little notch out of the very back of the case I want you to a few seconds very easy to do and just use my pocket knife with that modification the case became a perfect fit for this particular kit so next we're going to get into setting up SDR sharp SDR sharp is the software that is used communicate with your RTL SDR dongle it also includes the various drivers that you'll need so where do we get SDR sharp from well you'll download it from a website called air spy air spy makes their own version of an SDR radio that plugs into the USB port of a computer be warned though their unit want very high quality and very nice is also very expensive usually well over $100 fortunately their SDR sharp software works with pretty much any dongle that uses the archaeal this then becomes an excellently to get into software-defined radios you can then purchase the lesser expensive RTL SDR dongle we're talking about here and if you decide you're really into it you can come back to the air spy site and perhaps look at their download you can jump directly to the download page by going to the bitly link on the screen bit dot ly / SDR sharp alright let's go now and take a look at the software after we have downloaded it in my C Drive I created a folder called amateur radio this is going to hold several applications I'll be downloading onto this computer into this folder I have downloaded my SDR sharp - x86 zip file that I downloaded from air spy I unzipped this into its own SDR sharp folder we'll go into it and the first program we want is install rtl-sdr bad so I'll come down here and most likely you're going to need to run this as an administrator so I'm going to right-click on it and when I select run as administrator and there we go it was just that easy so at this point we can now plug in our dongle before we go on to the next step so let me pause the video here just a moment so I can go plug it in make sure you hook it to an antenna and then after it's plugged in we'll start the video back and continue on with the configuration all right so you've executed install rtl-sdr dot bat and you've plugged your device in if everything went well you should have some new files in your current folder I'm going to scroll down and you're now going to see we have a new file called zadig dot exe the dig is an application that helps you install the special drivers needed for your rtl-sdr dongle now if you don't have this file you can actually go to the rtl-sdr website and find the instructions for manually installing them here's their website just go to our TL - SD are calm and do a search on manual installation and they have the step-by-step instructions to manually downloading the two sets of files you'll need you need the drivers and then you'll need the dig software both of which you'll download and place into your a folder with the SGR sharp software okay let's return the folder so let's come back here and let's actually execute the Digby XE now we need to come in here and you need to check options list all devices we're going to change from USB audio device to bulk in interface 0 that's very important bulk in interface 0 now because I bring this already so I could set this up and test it it actually shows me that I already have the win USB Driver installed let's go take a quick look at a screen capture of this particular interface when you're installing it brand new in a fresh installation the driver on the left should read RTL 2832 you USB as you see here on the screen if that is what yours looks like you can simply click replace a driver and that's going to copy the RTL 2832 over-the-wing USB driver so your dongle wore correctly now upon clicking replace driver windows may pop up a message that says it can't verify the publisher of this driver software well that's okay you can click to install this driver software anyway and away you go ok so we'll say that installed successfully we can just close that siddig and now we're finally ready to run SGR sharp so find the SGR sharp XE double-click on it and it opens up for us so over here the first thing you'll need to do is in the drop-down you'll need to select our rtl-sdr --usb by default it comes up to air spine which is okay because that's the guys who make it we need to make sure the first time we change to rtl-sdr us be after you do that you need to come up here to the gear icon and click on configure source you'll pick the generic RTL 2832 OEM from the menu you actually have two choices because I was playing with this and installing it will just take number one we can leave the sample rate and sampling mode alone we have automatic gain control checked on for both the Archaea unit and the tuner if we wanted to we could uncheck these and then manually set the RF gain with this slider for right now leave the sample mode in quadrature sampling will explain some of these other modes later we'll click close and that's it now you can come up and set the frequency now we've already set ours but you could if you wanted to click on this first box cook at the top it goes up look at the bottom it goes down you can also click there and then type it in manually and so here I've just keyed in a random frequency let's go back to our weather frequency oh what's that you say weather frequency yes using the NOAA weather frequencies is a good way to test this let's take a look at those frequencies within the United States the National Weather Service runs a series of radio stations that are constantly broadcasting weather data you can listen in on these by going through one of the frequencies you see on the screen at the bitly link that not ly / weather frq you can see a list of all the 50 states and when you click on it it will show you the radio stations by geography for your particular state going there showed me that the closest station in my house was one sixty two point five five zero so let's go back into SDR sharp and tune in to that here we are back inside SDR sharp I'm going to come here I'm going to click on the number one so I can start tuning our frequency and as I said before I can choose to go up and down by clicking at the top and bottom of the letter but far more easy is to just simply type it in so I'm here on the one I want to type in one six two now you may be tempted to hit the decimal place don't do it you just enter this all is one big Hertz so it's now five five zero and then we'll just zero out zero zero zero or I can simply hit the enter key this now turns me into that frequency now I'm just going to click on the play button west winds around five miles per hour chance of rain 30% and you should now be hearing my forecast scattered rain showers highs in the upper 60s west winds 5 to 10 miles per hour chance of rain 50% I'm gonna stop the audio so we can go look at this I can adjust the zoom level of the upper display and you can see it zoomed in now if I hit play again Wednesday partly good adjusts it I can see a much tighter signal range if I don't like the colors I can come down here and adjust the contrast now these really only take effect while we are streaming so I'm going to come back to flooding that chance of rain and I'm gonna quiet him down a little all right hopefully you can still hear me good we'll come down here and I can click on the contrast some more darken it up lighten it up I can also adjust the range you see the upper graph I'm adjusting the dbe's that I can see and I can also adjust the offset typically we just leave the offset at zero let's go back over here on the left and we'll go ahead and stop him we can see I can have wide FM or narrow FM I can also go into the am band or a side band or upper sideband CW Digital side bands and of course raw just gives me mostly static to be honest but just lots of raw signal information with that road trying to apply any filtering or logic like that alright so let's do a little experiment I'm going to change this over to one of the ham frequencies when it click here we're gonna go one four six 500 and I am now in one of the simplex two meter frequencies next thing we're going to do is I'm going to go mute the microphone that I have so that you'll hear me coming over plus play that I'm going to mute the mic because I'm going to be on here I'm going to select n FM for narrow FM well that worked out pretty well got a pretty good signal out of the Hat now obviously you can use this to tune in just about any frequency you want to we can go all the way down into the local kilohertz range or we can get up into the gigahertz areas you might try tuning in one of your commercial FM radio stations or maybe a commercial am there are tons of things you can do with your RTL SDR receiver so we've now seen how well the RTL SDR dongle works at picking up things in the VHF range it also works great in the UHF and so forth but how well does it work in the lower HF bands well the answer is pretty well if you're using one of the newer dongles now with the original set of dongles that came out they did not work below 25 megahertz you had to purchase something called an up converter which was a separate unit in the more modern version in this case specifically version 3 of the RTL SDR dongle amusing it has the up converter already built-in so let's go listen to a conversation I was tuning around 160 meter ban and I found a conversation between several individuals it was at the 1.88 ohm megahertz frequency now there is one trick you have to know to be able to tune this in you need to come here to the little gear icon and you need to change the sampling mode to direct sampling cube ringing and that's what basically engages the up converter of course I've got it set to lower sideband and I want to hit play so that you can hear this now be aware I did edit this a little bit for time and also while they did identify and because they didn't know they were going to be on a video I remove their call signs out of respect for their privacy alright let's take a listen I'm gonna check the winners here so they still ain't got nobody listed without ever know it sure looks like they would - back there you know they ought to be proud of that they ought to say so I'm so good hey tickle dealt with it yeah yeah yeah you know he wanted one of them chairs to go with you alright that was pretty cool getting to listen in on that cue so or conversation between those hams let's take a second to look at navigating around within SDR sharp I already showed you earlier that I can set the zoom for my display window by using this slider I can get more frequency less frequency and really zoom in tightly once I set my frequency in the frequency area at the top I can fine tune it by using my scroll wheel so you can see the numbers going up and down as I move around I can make a big jump by simply coming over and clicking I can also come down here to the bottom and scroll my display area left and right I can also click on an area at the bottom to jump directly to that frequency now you may have noticed that my display looks a little different from the standard out of the box display that's because SDR sharp supports plugins you can find plugins on the rtl-sdr page again err spy is the one who makes the SDR sharp software RTL - str are the folks who make the dongle that we're using and they're big supporters of the SDR sharp software and they have a page all about plugins and you can see they list quite a number of them and they have installer packages for most of these so you simply download those and run the installer package you should place these inside the plugins folder of where ever you placed SDR sharp so here you can see I put my zip files that I downloaded extracted the zip file let's do the night mode plug-in one and what I extracted it there's either a readme that tells you what you need to do to install it some of these also have installer files that you can execute to install during the install process it will update a file called plugins not XML so you may have to manually update this file and you can just open it in notepad and do the editing and then some of these have installers that as I said will copy the files and update this file automatically for you once you get your plugins installed you simply restart and you can start taking advantage of some of the extra features now let's talk about some of the things in the panel over to the left because that's where all the plugins and all the built-in components exist you've already seen the source and the radio area let's scroll down a little bit to see some of the other pieces now a favorite of mine is the frequency manager with the frequency manager you can save groups of preset frequencies so you can see here if I show all groups I've got my HF bands I can throw down to some repeaters and The Weather Channel's of course I can also limit this to just certain groups let's go back to the NOAA Weather Radio and for this I'll need to come change my sampling mode back quadrature because we're above 25 megahertz and I can simply double click on one of these and you can see it automatically jumps me to that frequency all right let's scroll down and look at another one one is the band plan you may have noticed that on some of the HF band so let's jump back up here I'll just show you this goat a ham HF and it won't pick one of these and you can see the big red ham band showing up down at the bottom this is denoting where my various bands are and of course it goes beyond just the hand bands it also shows the shortwave bands and other areas and you'll simply check this on an orb and planned and say show on spectrum and there is a tool bar plug-in you can get and you can set different toolbar areas though the two bars going to be to the right of our large frequency display so here I can set my frequency step there's mode control and more so lots of different options that I can switch to the last plug-in I'll show you is pretty cool it's called night mode and I can simply change this to a very attractive looking display that works well in a dark ham Shack all right I think that's enough you should now have sufficient information to install and navigate around SDR sharp well I hope you enjoyed this introduction to the RTL SDR dongle as well as the SDR sharp software if you did how about giving us a like and sharing with your fellow radio enthusiasts if you have any questions just shoot me an email and for ixt at outlook.com or follow me on twitter at n4 ixt you can also find out more information about me at my blog arcane code not me thanks for watching

Channel: Arcane Tube

Views: 44,126

Keywords: RTL-SDR, SDRSharp, SDR#, Amateur Radio, Ham Radio, Radio

Id: AYMNEjAOwvo

Length: 24min 22sec (1462 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 26 2018