r/RTLSDR

Hello everyone, I recently bought myself a Blog V4 off amazon, but when it arrived I was unable to locate it in zadig, I attempted swapping the dlls out to no effect so I started trying to figure out if it was being detected by USB at all. It hasn't shown up in device manager or when using pnputil, I tested it on all my USB slots and a seperate machine (thinkpad) and couldn't get it to be detected in any way at all. Eventually I got a live Linux distro and ran sudo dmesg -w and confirmed that USB devices would get logged in the terminal. The Blog V4 had no logs whatsoever when plugged in or removed, it's like the PC didn't even know it existed.

I've started the return process but does anyone have any last ditch ideas?

Hey everyone,

I’ve been working on a small project and finally cleaned it up enough to share.

I built a web-based POCSAG/FLEX pager monitor that lets you decode and view pager traffic in real time using an SDR + multimon-ng pipeline with lot of functions.

👉 GitHub: https://github.com/Dj3ky/PagerMonitor

In my recording room I have this noise/interference sound. I recorded this using my U87 clone into my Allen & Heath CQ18T mixer, and I can hear it as well on my Rode NT1, but I can’t hear it at all with my Shure SM81. My best guess is that my xlr cable is picking up noise/interference somewhere, since it is a cheap Amazon basics xlr cable, and the problem gets worse/gets better when I touch the cable and move it around. I have tried multiple other Amazon basics xlr cables I have, same issue. I have ordered a WBC Pro star quad xlr cable with Neutrik connectors hoping to fix the noise, it’s not here yet, but I’m wondering what could be causing this noise in the first place, and why the SM81 was not affected at all it seems? I have made sure that the xlr cable from the mic to the interface isn’t touching anything, or any other cables. I have dimmer light switches in the recording room and around the building, but the noise does not improve with turning them off/down. Any advice is much appreciated.

I just started using SDR, but I am somewhat familiar with radios. I have a Baofeng I listen to local sheriffs. I can hear them on the handheld, but no signal shows up on SDR++. I can hear FM radio in to 104.000 range.

Looks beautiful, can't wait to test it !

Not sure if these posts are allowed, but I'll try anyway! I've been doing wildlife monitoring in the Kalahari (https://workingwithwildlife.org/) for the past 7 years tracking animals with VHF telemetry. The cost of dedicated receivers pushed me to look for an SDR solution, but every app I tried was simply not practical for field conditions, and could not meet my range needs. Even though I built it with wildlife tracking in mind, there was obviously no point to confine it to CW and typical wildlife frequency ranges. So it should be useful for other fields.

RTL-SDR.com featured it today: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/tracking-wildlife-in-south-africa-with-rtl-sdr-and-an-android-app/

The app supports CW, AM, NFM, WFM (mono and stereo), LSB, and USB and has a high resolution waterfall. Please let me know if the waterfall causes audio stuttering for anyone, it was a nightmare to get the high resolution waterfall and high sample rate to work smoothly on low-end devices. I only have a handful of devices that I can personally test on, but my J4 Core and Galaxy Tab 6 are both smooth now.

To get the most out of it for wildlife tracking, I tried to make it as user friendly as possible and to work well one-handed in the field.

- I tied the volume buttons to the Gain setting to mimic a conventional receiver.

- A toggle switch to easily enable/disable BiasT.

- Added a portrait-lock mode to prevent rotating in the field, and a dark mode for night work.

- Only four IQ filter bandwidth settings per demodulation mode. Wildlife beacons are typically ~20-50ms pulses, so the tightest filter (Extreme) eliminates most of the noise.

- Built-in mapping with bearing logging, triangulation, KML import/export. For me, I can import a KMZ of the reserve that I work on, and I can likewise import/export my bearings, POIs, and tracks to transfer between multiple devices or to open in Google Earth, QGIS, Excel, R, etc.

I also added a pulse-coherent detection mode that calibrates against the CW beacon (wildlife collar in my case) and coherently integrates periodic signals over time, pulling these weak CW signals out of the noise. This has helped me immensely to locate animals even when I can no longer hear the beacon.

The end result is that my ~$50 combo of a RTL-SDR V3/LNA combo is outperforming my $1 200 Comm Spec R-5000 receiver for my needs (which is a great device). I'm fortunate to have minimal RF noise given how remote I am, but I suppose some might require a bandpass filter depending on their situation.

I'd genuinely appreciate feedback from people who use their RTL-SDR regularly. I've been developing this mostly in isolation out in the bush and I know there's a lot I could improve upon. Here are some promo codes so some of you can try it out and let me know what you think:

C09TH1NFMZH84VJQLHWRWPV

2DYFMAMPFQ6W5QTUMQAHW9T

YL64DZS2Q62YJLNSAC4KEDM

JM3D0RJSQ5VA15N0MQ906C7

7SAH2HG8T0UZXZET3MB433A

I'll make the same post on r/amateurradio with different codes, but if they're all claimed and you still want to try it, send me a message.

Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wildlifetracker.vhf

Happy to answer any questions about the app or the wildlife tracking side of things. I'll be heading out now for some pangolin work now through the evening, but I'll try get back to questions (should there be any) later this evening. If my work takes longer than expected, I'll be on the road tomorrow for my first time away from the bush in forever, but I will respond as soon as I can!

Thanks for any feedback!

Started with a simple RTL-SDR dongle and a 1090 MHz antenna, ended up with a 24/7 live YouTube stream of Budapest airspace. Tech stack: - RTL-SDR → dump1090 → tar1090 as data source - Custom HTML5 Canvas visualization with no external map tiles - ffmpeg + Xvfb + Chromium for headless streaming - Groq AI API for real-time flight commentary - YouTube Data API v3 for dynamic stream title updates - Live chat interaction: viewers can highlight aircraft by typing callsigns

Live: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEn_DTVnbFw

Very busy in the UK usually Brazillians, When using Google translate seem to be truckers mainly, Also alot of Russians who seem to play the same stuff over and over, Scanning around 250-270 MHz FM if anyone interested. 👍

NRSC5 Studio is a native Windows desktop app for listening to HD Radio
broadcasts with an RTL-SDR dongle. Free, MIT-licensed, no installer, no
telemetry, no account, no nag.

It stands on the shoulders of:
- Aiden / theori-io - the underlying nrsc5 decoder
  https://github.com/theori-io/nrsc5
- osmocom - librtlsdr (modern build)
  https://github.com/osmocom/rtl-sdr
- cmnybo - nrsc5-gui (Python/Tk)
  https://github.com/cmnybo/nrsc5-gui
- markjfine - nrsc5-dui (Python/GTK)
  https://github.com/markjfine/nrsc5-dui

I wanted a polished, native-feeling Windows app and a place to play with
some ideas the existing frontends don't do, so I wrote one in Rust + egui.
The app opens the RTL-SDR itself, pipes raw I/Q into nrsc5 -r -, and taps the same stream for visualization and AGC.

Highlights:
- HD1 / HD2 / HD3 / HD4 subchannel playback with persistent presets
- Live spectrum panel — 1024-bin FFT trace with SDR#-style translucent
  gradient fill, the HD digital sidebands shaded at ±129–199 kHz, and
  a 256-row scrolling waterfall underneath with a turbo colormap.
  Driven from a tap on the same I/Q stream that feeds the decoder.
- Closed-loop AGC - host-side automatic gain control, separate from
  the dongle's hardware AGC. Walks the R820T2 gain table looking for
  the setting that maximizes per-sideband MER for the signal you're
  on. Hands-off lock on stations that previously needed manual gain
  fiddling. Switchable between Auto / Manual / Hardware AGC in the
  Signal panel.
- QPSK constellation scope driven by live per-sideband MER. Watching
  the cloud condense while the AGC walks into its sweet spot is
  satisfying in a way I didn't plan.
- Album-art heat-map collage - every unique cover seen in the last 8
  hours becomes a square tile, bucketed by play count (top tiles grow
  to 6x6 cells, long tail stays 1x1). Cached to disk so it survives
  Stop/Start and full restarts. Tile cap user-adjustable (1-512).
- 24-hour rolling song log with Timeline and Top Played views, plus
  CSV export for the scrobbler crowd. Aggressive filtering keeps
  station IDs / slogans / call signs out of the log.
- TPEG traffic-tile map and 90-minute weather radar loop with scrubber
  (iHeartMedia stations only - they're the only ones broadcasting it)
- Now-Playing pane with cover art and station logo
- Live MER (upper/lower) and BER readouts
- Windows per-app volume slider (COM-based), so the app's volume
  doesn't drag your whole system with it.
- Persistent dockable tabs, dark/light themes, DPI-aware

Hardware: any generic RTL2832U + R820T2 dongle works fine. RTL-SDR Blog
V4 also supported via the bundled modern librtlsdr. Windows 10/11
x86_64. Additional SDR's are on the Roadmap. Linux is also on the roadmap
but currently blocked on replacing the Windows-specific audio path.

Repo:    https://github.com/LTCAshraven/nrsc5-studio
Release: https://github.com/LTCAshraven/nrsc5-studio/releases/tag/v0.2.1

Feedback, bug reports, and "have you tried station XYZ" reports welcome.

Around 6:30pm (GMT+2) I noticed this massive surge in CW traffic. Anyone know what it is? Im in NL and I couldnt find any info about it being a contest

for the 2 guys who answered me in my last post

here's my sdr inside