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Reverse Engineering a Vintage Wireless Keypad with an RTL-SDR
Over on his blog, Veghead has posted about how he was able to reverse engineer a wireless alarm panel keypad from 1986 with an RTL-SDR dongle. The goal of his reverse engineering was to be able to...
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Reverse Engineering Wireless Mobile Traffic Lights with an RTL-SDR
When roadworks suddenly appeared on Bastian Bloessl’s girlfriends street the workers put up a set of automated wireless traffic lights to control the flow of traffic during the works. Seeing these...
View ArticleNew Demo of the Upcoming Spyverter Upconverter
The Spyverter is a new high performance upconverter that is being developed by the team behind the Airspy software defined radio and the SDR# software. It is designed to be used together with the...
View ArticleVideo showing SMS Texts and Voice Calls being sniffed with an RTL-SDR
Over on YouTube user Osama SH has uploaded a video briefly showing the steps needed to use an RTL-SDR dongle to sniff some SMS text messages and voice calls made from his own phone. This can be done if...
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Demonstrating the RTL-SDR based “Etch-A-SDR” Portable SDR
Over on YouTube user devnulling has uploaded a video showing his “Etch-A-SDR” project. This project involved creating an all-in-one SDR device out of an Odroid C1, Teensy 3.1 and an RTL-SDR dongle. The...
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Reverse engineering a wireless thermostat with an RTL-SDR
When Tom Taylors home heating boiler was replaced the builders also replaced the old wired rotary thermostat with a digital wireless one. It sounds good, but Tom soon discovered that the thermostat UI...
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An RTL-SDR Phase Correlative Direction Finder
Over on YouTube user Tatu Peltola has uploaded a video showing his RTL-SDR based phase correlative direction finder in action. This set up uses three RTL-SDR dongles and three antennas to measure phase...
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Receiving Digital Amateur TV from the ISS with an RTL-SDR
The international space station (ISS) is currently testing transmission of a DVB-S digital video signal. At the moment only a blank test pattern is transmitted, but one day they hope to be able to...
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An Unfiltered ADS-B co-op: ADSBexchange
Recently Dan, a reader of RTL-SDR.com wrote in to let us know about a new web project he’s started called adsbexchange.com. ADSBexchange is similar to services like FlightRadar24.com and...
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SDR-J Now Compatible with the Raspberry Pi 2
The popular software DAB (Digital Audio Broadcast) decoder SDR-J has recently been updated and can now run on the Raspberry Pi 2. In addition the author has also added experimental DRM decoding...
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Spektrum: New RTL-SDR Spectrum Analyzer Software
Recently a reader of RTL-SDR.com, Pavel wrote in to let us know about a new program called “Spektrum” which he has written. Spektrum runs on Windows and Linux and turns an RTL-SDR dongle into a...
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A modified dump1090 with ADS-B Heatmap and Range Alititude View
Dump1090 is one of the most popular ADS-B decoders that is used together with the RTL-SDR dongle. ADS-B stands for Automatic Dependant Surveillance Broadcast and is a system used by aircraft that...
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An RTL-SDR Based Smartwatch for Detecting Objects Touched by the Wearer
Disney Research have just released a paper describing an RTL-SDR based smart watch that they’ve developed a proof of concept for. The smart watch is unique in that it can be used to actually detect the...
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Using an RTL-SDR and Broadcast FM Radio RDS Signals to improve WiFi Networking
The performance of WiFi networks can depend heavily on how crowded the WiFi channels are in your area. For example when your neighbours start streaming a movie over their own separate WiFi network, it...
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Raspberry Pi Docker Images for ADS-B and ACARS with the RTL-SDR
Docker is a Linux based platform which allows you to build and deploy complex applications into a self contained “container” package that contains all the needed applications and dependencies. The...
View ArticleHak5: Reverse Engineering Radio Protocols with SDR and the Yardstick One
Over on YouTube the popular security and hacking themed channel Hak5 have created two videos together with Mike Ossmann (creator of the HackRF and Yardstick One) that give a good introduction and...
View Articlertl_power_fftw: An improved version of rtl_power designed for radio astronomy
As the RTL-SDR’s maximum usable bandwidth is about 2.8 MHz, programs like rtl_power were written to scan over wider bandwidths by quickly hopping between different swaths of the frequency spectrum and...
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JAERO: A new RTL-SDR compatible decoder for Inmarsat AERO signals
Back in August of this year we showed how it was possible to use an RTL-SDR dongle, satellite antenna, LNA and decoding software to receive and decode STD-C EGC signals from Inmarsat satellites. We...
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QSpectrumAnalyzer Updated to support rtl_power_fftw
QSpectrumAnalyzer is a Linux GUI for rtl_power which allows you to easily do wideband scans that are much wider than the RTL-SDR’s maximum bandwidth. RTL_power works by quickly switching between...
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Setting up an RTL-SDR based APT/Meteor Satellite Weather Station Receiver
Recently a reader of our blog, Initrd, wrote in to let us know about a new tutorial he created that shows how to set up a dual NOAA APT and Meteor LRPT weather satellite monitoring station with an...
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