Playing with Radio

Foundations of Amateur Radio

The other day I came across an article written by programmer, artist, and game designer "blinry" with the intriguing title: "Fifty Things you can do with a Software Defined Radio". Documenting a weeks' worth of joyous wandering through the radio spectrum it explains in readily accessible terms how they used an RTL-SDR dongle to explore the myriad radio transmissions that surround us all day and every day.

As you might know, I've been a radio amateur since 2010 and I must confess, even with all the things I've done and documented here, there's plenty in this adventure guide that I've yet to attempt.

For example, when was the last time you decoded the various sub-carriers in an FM broadcast signal, including the pilot tone, the stereo signal, station meta and road traffic information?

Have you ever decoded the 433 MHz sensor signals that your neighbours might have installed, weather, security and other gadgets?

Or decoded shipping data, transmitted using AIS, or Automatic Identification System, and for context, we're only up to item 12 on the list.

One of the biggest takeaways for me was that this is something that is accessible to anyone, and is a family friendly introduction to the world of radio that amateurs already know and love.

The article touches on various applications that you might use to explore the highways and byways of the radio spectrum, including SDR++, SDRangel, WSJT-X, QSSTV, and even mentions GNU Radio.

With enough detail to whet the appetite, I learned that SDRangel, developed by Edouard F4EXB and 70 other contributors, has all manner of interesting decoders built-in, like ADS-B, Stereo FM, RDS, DAB, AIS, weather balloon telemetry, APRS, even VOR.

As it happens, you don't even need to install SDRangel to get going. Head on over to sdrangel.org and click on "websdr" and it'll launch right in your browser. Once you're up and running, you can use your RTL-SDR dongle to start your own small step into the wide world of radio, amateur or not.

Sadly the PlutoSDR does not work on the experimental web version, so I had to install SDRangel locally. That said, I did get it to run and connect to my PlutoSDR which worked out of the box.

The user tutorial is online and the Quick-Start walks you through the process of getting the software installed and running. One thing that eluded me for way too long is the notion of channel decoders.

Essentially you configure the receiver, in my case a PlutoSDR, and start it running. You'll be able to change frequency and see the waterfall display, but nothing else happens, and there's no obvious AM, FM or other mode buttons you'd find on a traditional radio.

Instead, you'll need to add a channel decoder, cunningly disguised as a triangle with circles at the corners with a little plus symbol at the top. You'll find it immediately to the left of your device name. When you click it, you're presented with a list of channel decoders, which you can add to the work space. This will do the work of actually decoding the signal that's coming into the software.

SDRangel also supports M17, FreeDV, RTTY, FT8 and plenty of other amateur modes, and includes the ability to transmit. Oh, did I mention, it can also connect to remote kiwisdr receivers?

I have to say, it's a joy to see software that I've previously looked at and admittedly shied away from, actually doing something with the radio spectrum around me. I will confess that SDRangel has a lot of moving parts and it's like sendmail, user friendly, just picky whom it makes friends with.

So, time to dig in, play around and bring it to the next amateur radio field day "Show and Tell" and share with the general public just how interesting the radio spectrum around us can be.

I'm going to work my way through the 50 items, just for giggles.

What are you waiting for?

I'm Onno VK6FLAB