Full disclosure: ham radio isn’t for everyone, and there are many different facets to it. What appeals to one person might bore another to death. One area of ham radio that has changed a lot …
For local reception, receivers with RTL2832U chips are a cheap option. They are also called RTL-SDR. I have simply been using a long wire as a “random wire antenna”. Some of the older dongles also need an upconverter to be able to tune into low HF frequencies:
An upconverter for the RTL-SDR translates low HF frequencies ‘up’ into ones that are receivable by the RTL-SDR. This is a different method to the direct sampling mode used in the V3 dongles to achieve HF reception.
Thanks for sharing. It seems like there’s a lot of supported options. Many of them, I have no idea what are, but cars and doorbells are easy enough to understand, at least. Do you have any examples of interesting, less obvious use cases of your own, or of others’?
sure. well i am cheap. my neighbours arent. they have fancy stations like Bresser Weather.
so why not share data like a proper pirate? i bought several rtl sticks by now.
one i use in a pi/nuc/etc to just run https://github.com/merbanan/rtl_433 which has the excellent possibility to send the captured data over mqtt. so one line in terminal gives me weather data.
still too boring? gnuradio could helpp find interesting frequencies and you might wanna google what they are for.
you can also grab an send sensordata from busstationdisplay, temperaturecontrol of houses, tire pressure of passing cars etc.
you could use that data in homeassistant/nodered or whatever to trigger alerts…like that police car is close by, shutdown shutdown… and so on. new cars are so chatty.
For local reception, receivers with RTL2832U chips are a cheap option. They are also called RTL-SDR. I have simply been using a long wire as a “random wire antenna”. Some of the older dongles also need an upconverter to be able to tune into low HF frequencies:
Quoted source: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/a-homebrew-one-transistor-upconverter-for-the-rtl-sdr/
rtl433 on github is a joy to collect data and send somewhere
Thanks for sharing. It seems like there’s a lot of supported options. Many of them, I have no idea what are, but cars and doorbells are easy enough to understand, at least. Do you have any examples of interesting, less obvious use cases of your own, or of others’?
sure. well i am cheap. my neighbours arent. they have fancy stations like Bresser Weather. so why not share data like a proper pirate? i bought several rtl sticks by now. one i use in a pi/nuc/etc to just run https://github.com/merbanan/rtl_433 which has the excellent possibility to send the captured data over mqtt. so one line in terminal gives me weather data.
you could also grab flightpositions with the stick…if you share those you get even more data: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/rtl433-plugin-for-sdrsharp-updated/
still too boring? gnuradio could helpp find interesting frequencies and you might wanna google what they are for. you can also grab an send sensordata from busstationdisplay, temperaturecontrol of houses, tire pressure of passing cars etc. you could use that data in homeassistant/nodered or whatever to trigger alerts…like that police car is close by, shutdown shutdown… and so on. new cars are so chatty.
I like my rtlsdr. It’s great and super cheap.