Whipped Cream Difficulties

In the DEFCON 20 day 2 notes discussing the ADS-B presentation by Renderman, I alluded to some work on using USB TV tuners to pick up ADS-B broadcasts.

I did a little more research on this earlier today, just to satisfy my own curiosity.

The RTL2832U outputs 8-bit I/Q-samples, and the highest theoretically possible sample-rate is 3.2 MS/s, however, the highest sample-rate without lost samples that has been tested so far is 2.8 MS/s. The frequency range is highly dependent of the used tuner, dongles that use the Elonics E4000 offer the widest possible range (64 – 1700 MHz with a gap from approx. 1100 – 1250 MHz). When used out-of-spec, a tuning range of approx. 50 MHz – 2.2 GHz is possible (with gap). [Emphasis in the original – DB]

Holy cow! I’ve been wanting to mess with software defined radio, but the $1,500 cost for hardware is a bit discouraging. This looks like an excellent way to get started for about $20 instead. The necessary software is linked from the rtl-sdr page, and you can even get a script that will build gnuradio with the proper components.

What has been successfully tested so far is the reception of Broadcast FM and air traffic AM radio, TETRA, GMR, GSM, ADS-B and POCSAG.

Yow!

Edited to add 8/4: We are not amused. In the past two days, we have been to Fry’s. The shelves at Fry’s were almost completely stripped bare of USB TV adapters. We have also been to three different branches of Discount Electronics; none of them had any of the listed adapters. We have checked Google, and all of the adapters listed with the E4000 tuner do not appear to be available from vendors in the United States. The only adapter on rtl-sdr’s list that we were able to find was the Ezcap EZTV645 DVB-T Digital TV USB 2.0 Dongle with FM/DAB/Remote Controller which DealExtreme sells. However:

1. There are conflicting reports as to whether this is the one rtl-sdr is talking about, and whether this one has the E4000 tuner.
2. There are a lot of reports that DealExtreme is slow in shipping; as in, a month or longer.

I’ve ordered the Newsky TV28T that’s listed on the sysmocom site (linked from the rtl-sdr page). With shipping, it came out to 23.30 euros, or about $28.86 in dollars. That’s still well within my price range for tinkering with SDR. I’ll update when the device gets here.

In the meantime, if anyone has any GNURadio or general SDR tips, advice, or suggestions, please feel free to leave them in comments or shoot me an email. Contact addresses are in the usual place.

(And thanks, Borepatch.)

This entry was posted on Friday, August 3rd, 2012 at 4:17 pm and is filed under DEFCON 20, Geek, linux, project_e, Radio. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.