Creating a Signal Strength Heatmap with an RTL-SDR

Eartoearoak’s rtl-sdr scanner can save GPS location data along with spectrum samples, I had put USB GPS unit and SDR’s antenna on the top of my car, put my notebook with running scanner on the front seat and driven it around.

Then I saved results both as an image sequence (which you can see at the bottom of the map) and as the raw data in json format. My script (scan2web.rb[3] ) parses raw data, filters out redundant samples (which were captured standing at the traffic lights etc) and computes normalized spectrum power for eight 300-KHz bands for each spatial sample. Results are saved in heatmap.json[4] , which is rendered using Google maps v.3 heatmap API.

The Reddit thread discussing his project can be found here.

Image may be NSFW.
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Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.