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Build Suggestion: Portable Software Defined Radio Scanner

e14 Contributor

This may not be the most original idea, but it just occured to me anyway

 

You can get cheap ($22) Software Defined Radio (SDR) USB dongles to receive and demodulate almost any radio transmission.  Basically they are digital TV receivers that can receive quite a wide range of the RF spectrum.

 

Couple one of these with a Raspberry Pi, screen, battery, speaker, and slap it in a case, and you'd have a really powerful radio scanner or spectrum analyzer for about $150.

 

A few links

https://learn.adafruit.com/freq-show-raspberry-pi-rtl-sdr-scanner/overview

Portable RTL-SDR Running on Raspberry Pi - rtl-sdr.com

RTL-SDR used as a Cheap Real Time Spectrum Analyzer - rtl-sdr.com

Raspberry Pi RTL-SDR Scanner

  • Adam,

      I am working on a project to do something similar using Software Defined Radio (SDR) USB dongle, except I plan on using a FRDM-K64F from Freescale.I choose this because it has lower power needs and can go to sleep when not in use. It is a 120 Mhz clocked microcontroller which should be plenty of processing to gather data, save to SDHC card, and send on to PC for mapping on Google map. When I get the board, AdamB  come check it out my blog soon.

     

    Clem

  • I have thought about doing this same project. I don't really have a good setup for doing this but I thought it would be fun to do. I am also in the middle of a more complex project. My plan would include a touch screen interface and an ADSB feature as well.

  • Good idea, remember  you really need to define what you want to do at this point, a more powerful CPU preferably with some DSP assist will allow you to do all that Wide Bandwidth stuff that consumes vast CPU. Also a faster CPU allows you to run Say linux meaning you can use standard drivers for the USB radio device. Also here you can run standard programs or even GNU Radio as a frame work for your design. More CPU power more electrical power place your compromise where you will . I may also suggest other Arm boards like the Odroids as they have much more CPU power than the RPI and are more tractable for this problem.  Alternatively you can do more work and produce a very Stylish  SDR  but with less band width but requiring less CPU and power.