There seems to be a bit of a resurgence in shortwave lately. The Internet has displaced radio, but there's something fascinating about tapping into all of the various signals floating invisible around us.
@@SimonVideo I'm a 65yr-old Electronics Junkie who has always loved radio/shortwave. You should have listened during the Cold War in the 1980s. Wow...📻 🎼🎵🎶 Anyway, it's not too late to dive into airwaves. I believe SWL could become more popular as countries block with their Internet walls.
@@lilblackduc7312 i love to listen the hams in russia and Ukraine border, They are CRAZY, i have captured some videos of it, but i guess i need to translate what they say because its CRAZY
Someone discovered the world of SDR 😁 You will have a lot of fun with it😉 Not a pro myself, but some tips: If you can, get your antennas outside. That's always the best option. Build or buy a 2m groundplane antenna. You can transmit on it and they are great for listening to FM Broadcast, aircraft voice, ISS, NOAA weather satellites, 2m ham band, maybe there is something on 4m in your region. And a 1/4 wave 2m antenna is also a 3/4 wave 70cm antenna, so there is even more to receive with this one antenna. To improve reception, filters and maybe an amplifier can help. I still haven't tried decoding weather satellites myself. I like the idea of having a camera in space and getting the pictures directly from it. For shortwave, get a magnetic loop antenna like the MLA 30+ or YouLoop for example. Fldigi might be an interesting program for you to decode some stuff. But there might also be more modern software, not sure, it works for me. And just as I'm finished writing, the ISS is nearby. Listening to the repeater right now 🙂
Good to know! Thank you for all of the information. It looks like I've got a lot of things to experiment with. I still haven't been able to listen in on the ISS though
My parents bought me a radio as a child and i loved everything about it and eventually moved up to the CB radio,that was the 1980’s. Now it’s the end of 2023 and I’m getting back into it after buying myself a small SDR portable radio and now this RTL-SDR to set up at home on a virtually new laptop that’s just not used by the person i bought it for
Hello Simon!! I just stumbled upon your channel and i am amazed! You have amazing videos and as a ham radio operator i enyoi them very much. Love from S5 :)
This is awesome. Best video of its kind that I've seen as a beginner's tour through SDR radio. It's great that these devices are so inexpensive. Hopefully there's decent software for Mac as well.
Thanks for the great video, I've looked into this SDR a little time ago but never got around to buy it. so, if I ever do this video will be a great guide. If your more interested in radio tech you should consider buying some secondhand ham or CB radios at a swap meet.
Hey Simon, I am trying to make the analog transmitter you featured in a other video. Am not finished yet but I just wanted to say thank you for the tutorial, very cool!
Welcome to the hobby! Please do try putting out a long wire antenna and listening to some shortwave and ham broadcasts. You'll discover a whole new world out there.
That looks cool ngl, for real u could basically hunt for some stations in AM (only in Canada) but It’s pretty nice to listen a bunch of radio frequencies in your computer. Edit:OMG I REALIZED IM SECOND!1!
Just ordered one. They should make a stereo receiver that looks like a classy 1970s Pioneer or Marantz but with a tuning display like this. Kinda sacrilegious if you like analog tuning but it would be awesome in it's own way.
Hey, just wanted to give you some feedback on your channel! I found it because of your video on the TV transmitter you built and I find your videos really interesting (speaking as someone who loves retro tech). Thank you for the awesome work!
Learning about the F-35’s ability to passively monitor air defense and frequency hop somehow ended up bringing me here. The frequency hopping part obviously.
SDR Console is the best tuner I've found. Though there are others that have more specific uses (like SDR ANGEL for getting aircraft mapping), SDR Console has the most modes available including SATELLITE scheduling so you can AUTOMATICALLY get weather satellite passes, and with it ported to wxtoimg, you can even see the weather image! What I use mine for MOSTLY is as a digital trunking scanner. Yes, a police scanner that does DIGITAL TRUNKING so you don't have to dump $600 into a stand alone scanner. You do need 2 dongles, but it's really cool how it works. The software is SDRTRUNK. As with everything EACH of these have a learning curve, but they're a hell of a lot of FUN!!
@mikeh8416 Both. Could not find a way to tune in 99.5Mhz FM 😂 Sdr++, sdrshark and sdr touch are the only ones I was able to use. I tried almost all from the supported software list. The experience made me reconsider sdr as a new hoby 😅 not what I expected. It's like 10% RF stuff and 90% software coding. That's not fun. Otherwise I would be stuck with these wonderfully intuitive and not broken GUIs that are olympic winners when it comes to hiding something obvious in plain sight 🤨
IF you tune to the band from 7.0 Mhz to 7.3 Mhz you will hear cw in the lower section and lsb (lower side band) in the upper section. If you tune to 14.9 to 14.350, you will again hear cw and other digital signals in the lower section and usb (Upper side band) in the upper section. The difference is by convention only. It has to do (partially) with some of the limitations of very old radios that are no longer used. These are the 40 and 20 meter ham bands which will be have signals more often than the others. 40 is open around the clock, mostly, while 20 is daylight hours only unless you have more sophisticated receivers and antenna systems.
Good video, maybe mention the spectrums it can listen to. There are limits. The music playing over your voice is probably not necessary in this type of video. You may have heard of UFOs, I figure that they have a standing EM wave on the hull so the typical 10-15meter scout craft saucer might well have a primary tone around 20Mhz and with the power levels they run it could be loud and detectable for hundreds of km. Try to look for a main tone between 5 and 40MHz that's not audio, video or digital and it should have complex upper harmonics because they have to match the 3D mass distribution near them. If my speculations about how the physics works is correct which of course it is :) It might well be possible to tell from the radio signal the exact size of the craft and even eventually recognize the different designs and modes of operation.
Best investment for the price is the RSP1A from SDRPlay(even though they are horrible developers) and an MLA-30+ antenna for up to 30MHz and a cheap little *real* discone for above 30MHZ...
@@SimonVideo I can recomend not using WXtoImg, it's on all the online guides, but its abandonware and will make your life much harder trying to get it working right. NOAA-APT or satdump will work much better.
@@thomasdouwes I keep hoping someone will take over wxtoimg. I REALLY like being able to virtual cable directly to it and watch it draw LIVE.. Maybe the others will allow audio input eventually.
Hi! Really interesting videos, you're very impressive with how much you know at a young age. Keep it up!😀 I'm curious how old you are and are you thinking about ever making a discord server by chance?
Try to use AGC, as I saw, you overdriven it by setting the gain manually. I think AGC is a lot better than always getting it wrong ith the manual control.
Is there any way to make an SDR receiver like this with the raspberry pi without the RTL-SDR just by putting a wire on the GPIOs pins like you did on the fm transmitter with the raspberry pi?
You're in luck, the V4 just released and not only is it a little cheaper, it's supposed to have some much needed features that the V3 doesn't have. I just missed out by about a month, unfortunately, but even the V3 is lots of fun.
@@Diygary Uh oh, did you get that link from rtlsdrblog?? I bought mine from aliexpress through their shop to make sure I got a legitimate one… for some reason there’s a lot of fake units available. Or did you get a nooelec neSDR? There’s a v5 model of that one but I meant the RTLSDRBlog one
It's cool enough when one discovers that it could be run with an USB-OTG adapter from any phone, using for example SDR Touch. SDR at your fingertips :) Might be a bit noisy though.
I have 2 RTL dongles I bought over a year ago, they're on 24/7. My MORE EXPENSIVE Nooelec died after 8 months. The ONLY advantage the Nooelec had was a wider bandwidth. I'll stick with RTL, they just keep working.
![Chicken P - People's Favorite (Remix) [Feat. 42 Dugg] (Official Video)](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/a6Bn8FEtxmY/mqdefault.jpg)
There seems to be a bit of a resurgence in shortwave lately. The Internet has displaced radio, but there's something fascinating about tapping into all of the various signals floating invisible around us.
Exactly. It's just the concept of it. Radio stations pumping out tens of thousands of watts, etc.
@@SimonVideo I'm a 65yr-old Electronics Junkie who has always loved radio/shortwave. You should have listened during the Cold War in the 1980s. Wow...📻 🎼🎵🎶
Anyway, it's not too late to dive into airwaves. I believe SWL could become more popular as countries block with their Internet walls.
@@lilblackduc7312 i love to listen the hams in russia and Ukraine border, They are CRAZY, i have captured some videos of it, but i guess i need to translate what they say because its CRAZY
Someone discovered the world of SDR 😁 You will have a lot of fun with it😉
Not a pro myself, but some tips: If you can, get your antennas outside. That's always the best option. Build or buy a 2m groundplane antenna. You can transmit on it and they are great for listening to FM Broadcast, aircraft voice, ISS, NOAA weather satellites, 2m ham band, maybe there is something on 4m in your region. And a 1/4 wave 2m antenna is also a 3/4 wave 70cm antenna, so there is even more to receive with this one antenna. To improve reception, filters and maybe an amplifier can help. I still haven't tried decoding weather satellites myself. I like the idea of having a camera in space and getting the pictures directly from it.
For shortwave, get a magnetic loop antenna like the MLA 30+ or YouLoop for example. Fldigi might be an interesting program for you to decode some stuff. But there might also be more modern software, not sure, it works for me.
And just as I'm finished writing, the ISS is nearby. Listening to the repeater right now 🙂
Good to know! Thank you for all of the information. It looks like I've got a lot of things to experiment with. I still haven't been able to listen in on the ISS though
You just introduced Software Defined Radio to around ten-thousand viewers. Good job! Please, keep doing what you're doing...🇺🇸 👍☕
Thank you!
Thank you for introducing me to these. Your video popped up on my feed. Might have to buy one!
Thanks for watching!
RTLSDR is the gateway to amateur radio, I encourage you to look into the hobby more, a big part of it is SDR!
My parents bought me a radio as a child and i loved everything about it and eventually moved up to the CB radio,that was the 1980’s. Now it’s the end of 2023 and I’m getting back into it after buying myself a small SDR portable radio and now this RTL-SDR to set up at home on a virtually new laptop that’s just not used by the person i bought it for
I actually thought of getting a SDR, despite living in the city, I want to be able to read signals and create a radio telescope
Hello Simon!! I just stumbled upon your channel and i am amazed! You have amazing videos and as a ham radio operator i enyoi them very much. Love from S5 :)
Thank you!
This is awesome. Best video of its kind that I've seen as a beginner's tour through SDR radio. It's great that these devices are so inexpensive. Hopefully there's decent software for Mac as well.
Yeah! I love it. I've used "Gqrx" on Mac and I liked it
Thanks for the great video, I've looked into this SDR a little time ago but never got around to buy it. so, if I ever do this video will be a great guide. If your more interested in radio tech you should consider buying some secondhand ham or CB radios at a swap meet.
Hey Simon, I am trying to make the analog transmitter you featured in a other video. Am not finished yet but I just wanted to say thank you for the tutorial, very cool!
Yeah! Thank you for your comment
Welcome to the hobby! Please do try putting out a long wire antenna and listening to some shortwave and ham broadcasts. You'll discover a whole new world out there.
Yeah I used a bunch of cat5 haha.. didn't work well but I need to look into it more.
@@SimonVideo Even some old speaker wire does wonders.
That looks cool ngl, for real u could basically hunt for some stations in AM (only in Canada) but It’s pretty nice to listen a bunch of radio frequencies in your computer.
Edit:OMG I REALIZED IM SECOND!1!
Great video, very helpful and entertaining. You deserve a lot more subscribers. I am going to have a look at some of you other videos.
Thank you!
Just ordered one. They should make a stereo receiver that looks like a classy 1970s Pioneer or Marantz but with a tuning display like this. Kinda sacrilegious if you like analog tuning but it would be awesome in it's own way.
Yeah that would still be pretty cool
Hey, just wanted to give you some feedback on your channel! I found it because of your video on the TV transmitter you built and I find your videos really interesting (speaking as someone who loves retro tech). Thank you for the awesome work!
Awesome! Thank you for your comment!
Learning about the F-35’s ability to passively monitor air defense and frequency hop somehow ended up bringing me here. The frequency hopping part obviously.
RUclips algorithm is weird 😂
@@SimonVideo Honestly, I think searched software-defined radio to learn what SDR was about and you popped up.
SDR Console is the best tuner I've found. Though there are others that have more specific uses (like SDR ANGEL for getting aircraft mapping), SDR Console has the most modes available including SATELLITE scheduling so you can AUTOMATICALLY get weather satellite passes, and with it ported to wxtoimg, you can even see the weather image!
What I use mine for MOSTLY is as a digital trunking scanner. Yes, a police scanner that does DIGITAL TRUNKING so you don't have to dump $600 into a stand alone scanner. You do need 2 dongles, but it's really cool how it works. The software is SDRTRUNK.
As with everything EACH of these have a learning curve, but they're a hell of a lot of FUN!!
Yeah FUN, like spending 2 hours trying to figure out how to change the frequency before giving up 😂
@@spraitukas
Which one can't you figure out?
SDR Console couldn't be easier, I had it running in under 5 minutes INCLUDING saving favorites.
@mikeh8416 Both. Could not find a way to tune in 99.5Mhz FM 😂 Sdr++, sdrshark and sdr touch are the only ones I was able to use. I tried almost all from the supported software list. The experience made me reconsider sdr as a new hoby 😅 not what I expected. It's like 10% RF stuff and 90% software coding. That's not fun. Otherwise I would be stuck with these wonderfully intuitive and not broken GUIs that are olympic winners when it comes to hiding something obvious in plain sight 🤨
IF you tune to the band from 7.0 Mhz to 7.3 Mhz you will hear cw in the lower section and lsb (lower side band) in the upper section. If you tune to 14.9 to 14.350, you will again hear cw and other digital signals in the lower section and usb (Upper side band) in the upper section. The difference is by convention only. It has to do (partially) with some of the limitations of very old radios that are no longer used. These are the 40 and 20 meter ham bands which will be have signals more often than the others. 40 is open around the clock, mostly, while 20 is daylight hours only unless you have more sophisticated receivers and antenna systems.
Interesting.. Thank you for your comment! I'll have to try that out
Good video, maybe mention the spectrums it can listen to. There are limits. The music playing over your voice is probably not necessary in this type of video.
You may have heard of UFOs, I figure that they have a standing EM wave on the hull so the typical 10-15meter scout craft saucer might well have a primary tone around 20Mhz and with the power levels they run it could be loud and detectable for hundreds of km. Try to look for a main tone between 5 and 40MHz that's not audio, video or digital and it should have complex upper harmonics because they have to match the 3D mass distribution near them. If my speculations about how the physics works is correct which of course it is :)
It might well be possible to tell from the radio signal the exact size of the craft and even eventually recognize the different designs and modes of operation.
Rtl sdr is a cool little unit 😊
7:31 yo i love that song
LOL
Best investment for the price is the RSP1A from SDRPlay(even though they are horrible developers) and an MLA-30+ antenna for up to 30MHz and a cheap little *real* discone for above 30MHZ...
I'll have to check that out, thanks for letting me know! Why are they bad devs?
10:45 - You’re most likely referring to shortwave/HAM radio transmissions when it comes to broadcasts that use USB/LSB.
Ahhhh okay!
If you haven't already tried, you can receive APT and LRPT weather images from satellites at 137MHz with that dipole.
oooooh cool! I'll try that out
@@SimonVideo I can recomend not using WXtoImg, it's on all the online guides, but its abandonware and will make your life much harder trying to get it working right. NOAA-APT or satdump will work much better.
@@thomasdouwes I keep hoping someone will take over wxtoimg. I REALLY like being able to virtual cable directly to it and watch it draw LIVE..
Maybe the others will allow audio input eventually.
Hi! Really interesting videos, you're very impressive with how much you know at a young age. Keep it up!😀 I'm curious how old you are and are you thinking about ever making a discord server by chance?
Thank you! At the moment I'm not planning on setting one up but it would be cool in the future
Oh okay gotcha, also you sound like about early high school age. It took me till college to really get into electronic stuff
could you make a video about ads-b?
Pair it with a phone and an USB-OTG adapter, get SDR Touch and go! No PC needed. :)
When I try the AM, my Sampling Mode is disabled, so I cannot change it to Quadrature sampling..
Hmm.. did you press the stop button first? It won't let you change when it's in use
Your SDR needs to support direct sampling
Try to use AGC, as I saw, you overdriven it by setting the gain manually. I think AGC is a lot better than always getting it wrong ith the manual control.
Interesting.. I never had good luck with agc for fringe stations but I'll give it another shot
Is there any way to make an SDR receiver like this with the raspberry pi without the RTL-SDR just by putting a wire on the GPIOs pins like you did on the fm transmitter with the raspberry pi?
I did a quick search and I don't think you can.. but I would look into it yourself
No. You can marry a Raspberry Pi to several SDRS (and many better than the dongle used in this video).
That's it! I NEED to purchase this now!
btw im first please pin me
You're in luck, the V4 just released and not only is it a little cheaper, it's supposed to have some much needed features that the V3 doesn't have. I just missed out by about a month, unfortunately, but even the V3 is lots of fun.
@@LumaControl V4? I just ordered the V5 a couple of moments ago. I hadn't seen any V4's on amazon.
@@Diygary Uh oh, did you get that link from rtlsdrblog?? I bought mine from aliexpress through their shop to make sure I got a legitimate one… for some reason there’s a lot of fake units available. Or did you get a nooelec neSDR? There’s a v5 model of that one but I meant the RTLSDRBlog one
@@Diygary You're referring to the Nooelec V5
This things been out for years. And no this is not the "coolest"
It's cool enough when one discovers that it could be run with an USB-OTG adapter from any phone, using for example SDR Touch. SDR at your fingertips :) Might be a bit noisy though.
22 yr old hot blondes are the coolest, but SDR is DEFINITELY #2!!
And you're the cool expert commenting on ameture radio RUclips videos?
@@austinthornley1272 yes, as you are. Not sure the point you are trying to make, if any?
@johnr2391 you can't hurt my feelings, I have a wife and kids. I'm assuming you don't
I like handheld ham radios to listen 😂 I don't have any interest to get the licence so sdr is a gamechanger for me my first sdr radio was rtl sdr v4
That's awesome!
So I could turn a computer into a police scanner???
I mean...
Use SDR++ its way better
Let me Tell You One Thing, YOU DON`T DISCOVER RADIO WORL,D AND SDR, IT DISCOVERS YOU AND LET ME TELL YOU. IT WILL TAKE OVER YOUR LIFE !!!
😂😂
@@SimonVideo Im cerial
Hahaha he said plug in your dongle.
😭
just get a much better Nooelec for cheaper
I have 2 RTL dongles I bought over a year ago, they're on 24/7. My MORE EXPENSIVE Nooelec died after 8 months. The ONLY advantage the Nooelec had was a wider bandwidth. I'll stick with RTL, they just keep working.