r/RTLSDR

Been working on this project last few weeks. Setup at my parents house in Hull, MA: Retevis MA06 marine antenna in a window facing Boston Harbor → RTL-SDR → Pi 4 running rtl_airband. The entire US marine band is only ~1.4 MHz wide, so one dongle grabs the whole thing in a single window and rtl_airband demods every channel in parallel 16 labeled Icecast streams instead of one scanner hopping around and missing half of everything.

From there each stream ships to a backend that runs speech-to-text on all of it, and an LLM sorts a day of radio into the ~5 minutes actually worth hearing. Marine VHF is dead boring until it very suddenly isn't. Week one my node caught a 29ft Cobalt with 7 people aboard taking on water calling Sector Boston on 16. Whole exchange, start to rescue. I put a replay on the site with captions synced to the chart - docktalk.app, scroll to the demo phone.

The ask: Boston works, I want 5 harbors before the iOS app ships. If you have line of sight to a busy harbor, the install is now one curl command with a claim code it pulls your harbor's channel plan and you show up on the leaderboard at docktalk.app within a minute. ~$165 in parts, ~$112 if you have a spare Pi (any Debian box works honestly), and if your spot is genuinely good I'll just ship you the kit free. Hosts get the app's premium tier free for as long as the node runs + credit on everything their box hears first.

Straight up since it always comes up: this is a company I'm building, not an open-data project audio goes to our network only. If that's a dealbreaker, all good. If you already feed aisstream/FR24/MarineTraffic, this doesn't touch your existing setup, it's one more dongle to your existing set up!

RX only, public unencrypted spectrum, same legal footing scanner feeds and LiveATC have been on for 20+ years.

Happy to go deep on the RF chain, rtl_airband config, or the ASR pipeline in comments.

Once I get 5 harbors covered I'll launch the iOS app!!

ay guys! i found this transmission, it seems to be kids transmitting with something on the spanish military band, this happened in Cantabria at 14:05 near Santander

i guess this is illegal right? will it be worth it to triangulate the location and try to alert the parent about it? There seems to be military activity right now with planes flying around here lol

FoxSDR a new SDR receiver for Windows, built from scratch in a clean-room environment

I've been building Fox SDR, a from-the-ground-up SDR receiver app for Windows. It's a complete clean-room implementation no cde read from or derived from any existing SDR project (SDR++, GQRX, etc.), everything written fresh from published specs and standards, with permissively-licensed dependencies only.

Features so far:

• Wideband receiver with spectrum + waterfall, AM/FM/SSB/CW demodulation, RDS decoding, click-to-tune
• SoapySDR hardware support (developed and verified on a USRP B200; RTL-SDR and others via Soapy modules)
• Full browser remote control the entire app is also usable from a web browser on your LAN with feature parity: waterfall, tuning, audio streaming, map, decoders, even plugin installs
• Plugin system with a public catalogue: ADS-B (verified against real off-air traffic), AIS, APRS, POCSAG, SSTV (Martin/Scottie), aircraft registration lookup, and more
• Built-in map showing decoded aircraft, vesels, and APRS stations, with plugin-supplied basemap tiles
• IQ recording, bookmarks, scanner, frequency presets
• Windows installer, no telemetry games, no account required
• Ask For any feature you need it will be built we aim to add every feature with in one week from notification

Links:

• Website: https://foxsdr.com
• Plugin catalogue: https://github.com/wonderingStars/foxsdr-plugins
• Main repo: https://github.com/wonderingStars/foxsdr

[linux with python3-pip python3-venv]
If esptool and pyserial already installed:

esptool.py -p /dev/ttyACM0 --chip esp32s3 write_flash 0x0 ats-mini.ino.merged.bin

Source code:

OSPI version is suitable for Si4732
esp32s3 V1/V3 ats-mini

https://github.com/esp32-si4732/ats-mini/releases

Bought an RTL SDR two days back. I am trying to decode a DMR signal but it just doesn't work no matter what I tweak? While it does decode to an extent, it isn't perfect. Is there a fault with the device or is there something wrong with what I'm doing. Using an app called P25 decoder on 444.162 MHZ. Sharing product photo and error screenshots below.

Thank you

RetroSpectrum beta is now open.

It's an open-source SDR/SIGINT platform I've been building to bring signal collection, analysis, decoding, classification, and sharing into one place, with post-quantum-secure connections between users.

Still a work in progress, so feedback, testing and suggestions are welcome.

https://github.com/hassanfarescodes/retrospectrum

#SDR #HackRF #SIGINT #OpenSource #SignalProcessing

We've developed an OSS WiFi survey tool with off-the-shelf hardware, including a couple of cheap USB dongles, a HackRF SDR, Raspberry Pi 4, and a small app that runs on your iPhone and communicates with the rPi over bluetooth. The iPhone app also streams live data into ServiceRadar (https://github.com/carverauto/serviceradar). We're working on a prototype custom PCB and looking for people that might be interested in helping with that, everything in this project is OSS, including any hardware we design. If you're interested in learning more drop me a line or join our Discord.

App will be available on TestFlight and we're writing a blog post that describes how to get this up and running and includes a BOM (bill of materials). Stay tuned.

The base model starts at 4.5 GHz and offers 40 MHz real-time bandwidth at around $2,399. If the underlying hardware is actually the same across the higher-frequency models, there might even be potential for a software unlock to push it all the way to 14 GHz.
At $2,399, that could be a seriously compelling spectrum analyzer

we are monday 17th in France, and there are still a few stones falling from space; much less but still you can't miss it if you stay tune to your local distant 2m beacon for a half hour.

The sound it makes is here : https://app.box.com/s/q4a12rhcdo8t2rhkyugy981pok2sm91o

14076.5 khz USB is no more the crowd it used to be; but this afternoon I saw a QSO between Ohio (a long time veteran in that great 120 seconds mode) and Belarus.

I love this mode's signature.

Discoved this tiny device.