Radio, SDR & RF-related

Is Sup Forums into amateur radio? I recently bought a VHF/UHF radio and modified it to transmit out-of-band to mess with local businesses and talk on satellites. Ham radio is full of old men but you can have a lot of fun with an SDR or modified transmitter.

Cheap ways to get into radio:
-Baofeng UV-5R: /csg/-worthy $25 Chinese dual-band handheld
-rtl-sdr: $25 European USB TV receiver repurposed as SDR

Discussion:
-Do you have a radio?
-Have you ever identified weird signals?
-Do you prefer analog or digital modes?
-Have you ever done anything naughty with your radio?

Other urls found in this thread:

elttam.com.au/blog/intro-sdr-and-rf-analysis/
scheme.se/
thomin.com/wxtoimg/
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

Also, are there any anons in the SF bay area that would be interested in a local beacon / morse code BBS? I'm thinking about dropping an rPi or BBB hacked into a Baofeng into the mountains somewhere on solar power. It would periodically transmit general info via morse code, but you could also transmit to it via morse to leave messages on the BBS or interact with it in other ways. I need suggestions.

I want to buy an rtl sdr to do wi fi and sdr, any brand in particular I can use to attach to my raspi?

I bought mine from NooElec and they seem very reputable. I also suggest getting a ham-it-up so you can listen to HF.

Thanks.

there's an ARRL license exam session this Saturday. I've only fiddled around with my SDR and UV5R, but don't have much actual knowledge. If I work full time this week and study this book at night, do you think I'll be able to pass the Technician exam?

I use my sdr with adsbscope to track airplanes. Also use dsd for listening to trunking calls. The baofeng is useful for keying up repeaters especially if I'm driving around though I don't really talk on it since I'm still unlicensed.

I don’t think you need the book. I used hamstudy.org and aced the technitian exam. The practice tests has questions from the actual exam question pool.

Recommended antenna for rtl-sdr? The one that came with it is barely longer than my pinky. That combined with being indoors means I pick up nothing but static.

If you honestly know what you're doing the best thing to do is to download the FCC callsign database and find an unused callsign that you like. There's no reason to broadcast a unique tracking number publicly linked to your full name and address.

Just find a bigger antenna that operates in your desired frequency range.

Yeah, but where do you buy your antennas from? Do all radio websites look like they were made in 2003?

I suggest making a loop antenna for your desired frequency. See pic related. It can be a circle, triangle, whatever, as long as the perimeter is equal to the wavelength you want to tune to. I made a quad out of a couple of rulers that I notched and bisected for 70cm.

Interesting, I'll check this.

What said, or else just buy one off Amazon if you're too lazy.

As long as you're not transmitting you don't need to worry much about SWR or being dead-on, so it's safe to bullshit an antenna and call it good enough. You'll probably find that anything you make is sensitive enough well out of the target frequency.

I'm an RTLSDR type guy. No need for even taking the licence test.

I purchased an SDRPlay RSP1 a few months ago and it's good fun. I lose interest for like a year at a time and then are interested for about a month again.

My antenna is a pizza pan antenna I found through /r/rtlsdr.

can Sup Forums tell me the interesting shit found on uhf/vhf band?

truckers? conspiracy theorist? numbers station?

In my area there's military talk on the lower part of the VHF band. In the middle of the two bands are the ham bands which is a bunch of bored old men bitching about their wives and talking about home depot. There's a ton of police activity on the upper end of the UHF band, it's like Sup Forums's Chicago police scanner but there's multiple of them. Everywhere else is commercially licensed spectrum. I've heard stores and drive thrus and truckers and ambulances and utility company talk there.

I studied for around a week and I got 32 out of the 35 you need or something like that. If you're mildly familiar with solderding and circuit diagrams you'll do fine

I just took a few practice tests and read up a bit on my wrong answers before taking the real test

Bump.

I'm in the bay area user. Would be willing to help out if you needed someone to hike to the top of mt. diablo or something.

I was thinking Mt. Umunhum because it's close and it recently opened to the public (I tried to hike up there a few times but got tired), but Diablo would probably cover a better part of the Bay. Now that I know there's somebody that would actually notice it I think I'll actually do it. The UV-5R only puts out 5W and a decently sized solar panel can't power much more, so it shouldn't be too far from the cities. Do you think morse is a good choice or should I use Bell 103 or similar? I'll have to find a morse software decoder that is very tolerant of newbies (myself included).

>European USB TV receiver repurposed as SDR
How? What model?

The RTL2832U was originally a DVB-T receiver.

I'm a complete brainlet when it comes to radios. The best I can do for you is place your pi on top of Mt. Diablo, somewhere with lots of sun.

Maybe its better to hash this out over IRC or PGP? I have a hom server with a jabber client, but its just for shitting around and testing. I haven't gotten around to hardening the server or even generating basic SSL/TLS certs.

oh thanks

What software do you guys use? I am looking for something I can use in my headless server to keep it connected all the time.

>Cheap ways to get into radio:
is hackrf respective of its cost?

What do you mean, specifically? I've used rtl_tcp over a network before.

I would go for it if you can find a good deal on eBay and have the money. The wide bandwidth is useful but the transmit capability really sells it because it opens up so many possibilities. You can do a lot even with simple replay attacks. Every now and then a good USRP comes up on eBay which is also worth looking out for.

I want to capture stream too, wifi, tv, local stations, but without a graphical desktop available. Which program can do this?

You'll need an SDR with massive bandwidth for WiFi. That will run you thousands of dollars I don't know why you would ever do such a thing. Assuming you're in North America, you can use GNU Radio with the ATSC blocks to do TV capture, but again, I don't know why you would ever do such a thing. There are dedicated TV tuning cards and sticks. Local radio stations can easily be had with a cheap rtl-sdr, but the audio quality won't be stellar and you can probably find their online streams anyway. You really shoudn't try to use SDR in these commodity markets where there is dedicated hardware to do what you want at a fraction of the cost.

That's a good way to get your dumbass caught. If you are so worried about being tracked stop using all electronics. Aluminum foil hats help with the government signals. Also, I'd stay indoors to provide protection from the chem trails. I almost forgot, you may reconsider drinking water as it is known to cause the gay, faggot.

>caught
By whom?

Retard

how do I detect the frequency something is transmitting at? does sdr have something like an rf sniffer?
I have an old remote control ceiling fan/light module that I want to use but the remote is sorta fucked and doesnt always work.
I want to find the frequency and codes and make a cobbled together bullshit that can act as a new remote or just do it though the computer.

just tune to commonly used frequency ranges, use the device, and see if it shows up. start with 40MHz and 433MHz.

search for "how to hack and clone garage door opener" type guides, it's a pretty common topic.

Ok, Ill start from there.
Do I need to look for a certain feature in a sdr dongle? Can /csg/ ones be used with some degree of accuracy/reliability? This subject is almost completely new to me.

look for "RTL2832U", it's a very common cheap SDR that can be found on chink sites.

you might want to spend an extra $15 and get the "RTL-SDR Blog" kit from amazon. comes with big antennas, mounts, and has good guides to get started quickly.

Ill look for those.
Thanks again. sorry for the slow replies, have alot going on.

moar info?

...

That looks like a frame from MLP to me so I don't know where you're going with that...

Or you could, you know, just Google the FCC ID printed on the remote and get the spec sheet.

Ill see if I can find the other half of its case and try that. I think I tried looking for the patent before and couldnt find shit.

>-Do you have a radio?
Yes, an FT-950, a TM-V71A, UV-5R Baofeng
>-Have you ever identified weird signals?
Yes, it is fun.
>-Do you prefer analog or digital modes?
No preference.
>-Have you ever done anything naughty with your radio?
Not intentionally, I am licensed.

If you work fulltime on studying via hamstudy you can easily pass General, perhaps zero to extra.

DO IT. HF is worth it.

Mine was 434 kHz.

Correction! That was a remote temperature sensor. Garage door opener was 391 MHz.

Those same old men come to your house and rape you if you don't have a ham license and still use your shitty baofeng

Im dealing with a fan control/light dimmer

i've been trying to get into this for a while, i can't go to school for it i'm not sure where to start. RF is interesting to me, especially telecommunications, but I'm out of school. feels bad

Hunter?

Get a $20 SDR dongle and commence ta hackin'.

elttam.com.au/blog/intro-sdr-and-rf-analysis/

i love you

I think so. the remote was rf for the ceiling fan light and was built into a media center remote for tv/vcr/cable boxes. the fan controls were at the bottom.

fcc id chq8bt7096t 303.85 MHz

Im sure they reuse the guts so it very well could be that frequency.
The one I have looks like a normal universal tv remote except it has fan controls in a plus sign at the bottom for off, low, medium, and high, and in the center there is a light button that toggles on/off and full range dimming on hold.

Thanks for pointing me to the fcc thing. Ill look for that when I find the remote/ receiver, or paper work again.

If I got two of those chinese radios, could they work like a two way walkietalkie except with a huge range?

You can't increase the range by combining two radios if that's what you're suggesting. If you want to increase the range, get an RF power amp in your desired frequency band. However, if you're going to be putting out any more than the stock 5W, you really need to get a decent, non-chinese radio because the Baofengs put out a lot of unintended noise.

Ignore that post I've been awake for 36 hours. You can easily use two of them in different locations to talk like normal walkies-talkies. That's half of their intended use, really. These radios are really popular with airsoft and ATV guys for that purpose.

>-Do you have a radio?
Yes.
Baofeng F8HP, Yaesu FT-450AT, TYT MD-380, Kenwood V71A, RTL-SDR (the SDR mentioned in your post)
>-Have you ever identified weird signals?
Somewhat, I am working to make a NOAA satellite antenna to receive weather satellites and decode them.
>-Do you prefer analog or digital modes?
Digital modes are fun, and I run them on the Yaesu on HF bands.
The MD380 is a DMR radio, and I have used it on the local DMR repeater, which is linked across the US.
I am working to configure the V71 as a linked radio 'node' that would allow me to connect it across the internet to a larger radio system. This would allow me to talk to a linked repeater system in another city.
>-Have you ever done anything naughty with your radio?
I have done nothing against FCC regulations :)

>NOAA satellite antenna
Wow, that brings up a lot of strange antenna designs. What is the advantage of the weather satellites? Availability in the open ocean?

That sounds like a good idea. You can find my contact info at scheme.se/
I've been thinking that maybe a voice interface would be better; it would be much more usable and possibly less work to set up.
FM transmit power and bandwidth is constant regardless of the modulating signal, so there's really no advantage to morse if I can get speech recognition to work well enough over a noisy channel.

bamp

>What is the advantage of the weather satellites?
Cool shit is the advantage!
thomin.com/wxtoimg/

Best antenna is a circularly polarized yagi, pic related. Advantage of weather satellites is nothing in particular, you just get to see cool satellite images of the earth by pointing a piece of metal at the sky. It's like magic.

how do you like your md-380? DMR is looking like it will be my next frontier, so to speak.

forgot pic

My jammer made with sx1278 and a pic12f683. 1W output but it's absolute murder when it's adapted to jam specific targets. I know it's illegal I am a slav in slavic country so I don't care about laws.

>tfw I ordered that shit on ali in June and it never arrived

I got the money back, I don't know if I should order it again from another seller

Could I use an HT and an SDR to make a setup for listening to trunked radio? I've got a Baofeng with fucked Tx so I was thinking I could use that to monitor the control channel and the SDR for tuning to the temporary frequencies.

stop trying to save pennies and buy it from amazon you idiot
> Could I use an HT and an SDR to make a setup for listening to trunked radio? I've got a Baofeng with fucked Tx so I was thinking I could use that to monitor the control channel and the SDR for tuning to the temporary frequencies.
HT would not have any purpose but you can definitely decode trunked radio with a cheap SDR receiver. The difficulty comes with bandwidth, my local P25 phase 2 system is 10mhz wide which means I can only reasonably decode it with a hackrf, an rtlsdr won't do. But my local system is not normal and you may have better luck. Search for sdrtrunk on github.

Forgot to (You) you. ^

Amazon does not ship to my county, why do you have to be mean to me user?

;_;

sorry dude I just assumed everyone on this website was american, didn't mean to be so harsh. What country do you live in?

bump

bump

>He thinks triangulation is this easy and used on small fry

Neat. What do you jam? Can you select a specific frequency or does it jam the entire band that the sx1278 is capable of?

Especially if the target is using a directional antenna. The FCC has no regulatory power these days anyway, pirate stations and beacons stay up for years. I remember a story about a pirate station in a van. Whenever the feds put a note on the van, they just drove it somewhere else.