Thinking of getting an sdr dongle - is there much interesting stuff going on around t

I've never recorded any spectrum of SDR's but it's something I would like to do in the future whenever I can get my SDR set up in such a way as I don't have to dismantle it, I have 2 yr 3 month old and 3 yr 10 month old boys and they literally wreck the house. I've had to put all the chairs in the dining area and lock them in the conservatory to stop them climbing on work tops and pulling stuff out of presses, a nightmare !

All my radios are locked away, have to hide the laptop etc and at this moment in time I don't have a room that I can set up stuff and lock the door , unfortunately. I have the Kiwi SDR locked in the shed though which I can access remotely, it's not an environment I would keep a laptop though.

Anyway, try this link and see if it provides you with any useful information, it seems a bit tricky to set up. https://swling.com/blog/2016/11/portable-shortwave-spectrum-capture-for-the-urban-city-dweller/

There's a lot of interesting stuff late at night on SW and it would be great to be able to record entire bands.

Most SDRs won't capture more than 2 Mhz at a time and at that you'll probably need a Core i5 CPU minimum, some like the Airspy HF+ only show about 750 khz of bandwidth at a time which is fine for me.

My Kiwi SDR is capable of seeing from about 10 Khz all the way to 30 Mhz and it would be nice to be able to capture this when I can't sit up all night. I must pop the question on the Kiwi forums.

briany

Deleted User wrote: »

I've never recorded any spectrum of SDR's but it's something I would like to do in the future whenever I can get my SDR set up in such a way as I don't have to dismantle it, I have 2 yr 3 month old and 3 yr 10 month old boys and they literally wreck the house. I've had to put all the chairs in the dining area and lock them in the conservatory to stop them climbing on work tops and pulling stuff out of presses, a nightmare !

All my radios are locked away, have to hide the laptop etc and at this moment in time I don't have a room that I can set up stuff and lock the door , unfortunately. I have the Kiwi SDR locked in the shed though which I can access remotely, it's not an environment I would keep a laptop though.

Anyway, try this link and see if it provides you with any useful information, it seems a bit tricky to set up. https://swling.com/blog/2016/11/portable-shortwave-spectrum-capture-for-the-urban-city-dweller/

There's a lot of interesting stuff late at night on SW and it would be great to be able to record entire bands.

Most SDRs won't capture more than 2 Mhz at a time and at that you'll probably need a Core i5 CPU minimum, some like the Airspy HF+ only show about 750 khz of bandwidth at a time which is fine for me.

My Kiwi SDR is capable of seeing from about 10 Khz all the way to 30 Mhz and it would be nice to be able to capture this when I can't sit up all night. I must pop the question on the Kiwi forums.

Firstly, I'm surprised that this practice isn't asked about more. Looking at other discussion forums on the topic of SDR, it's not one that comes up ever so often.

I don't know about ye, but the idea of monitoring a radio spectrum in real time doesn't really interest me because I worry that amounts to hearing a whole lot of dead air. Computer hardware and automated software could monitor and record radio far more efficiently than I could manually.

In the link you posted, the guy seems to be using an Airspy. However, my problem would be that I don't have one at my disposal, and the configuration options are different for different hardware in SDR#. I've made a couple of attempts at recording bandwidth with 3 different recording plugins available, but they all give the same .wav output and only play back an extremely narrow spectrum of about .010 MHZ. That's pretty much just what I had the dial set to at the time of recording.

briany

briany wrote: »

I don't know about ye, but the idea of monitoring a radio spectrum in real time doesn't really interest me because I worry that amounts to hearing a whole lot of dead air. Computer hardware and automated software could monitor and record radio far more efficiently than I could manually.

I don't get what you're trying to achieve reading this ?

I get you want to record but what exactly ?

briany

Deleted User wrote: »

I don't get what you're trying to achieve reading this ?

I get you want to record but what exactly ?

Shipping traffic, aircraft, 2m Ham, ISS downlink. That kind of thing. But this type of traffic can be intermittent, I suppose, hence the preference to record these bands (not at the same time, obviously) and pick through them later.

Yes it would be convenient. Head off to bed and listen the next day.

WHL

You can do this with SDR Console. I have a SDRplay 2 and have used the scheduled recorder to capture the entire MW band during nighttime to see if I can pick up transatlantic stations. It works well.
SDRplay has a bandwidth of up to 8 MHz so you could presumably record that amount of spectrum at one time

I use SDR console sometimes and I never noticed this, but I must check it out , thanks, I kinda like scanning the SW bands live lol.

WHL

There is a Rec/Playback tab along the top of the SDR Console screen. I usually listen live on HF also but I do record overnight sometimes from 5 to the hour until 5 past to get the top of the hour ident

briany

WHL wrote: »

There is a Rec/Playback tab along the top of the SDR Console screen. I usually listen live on HF also but I do record overnight sometimes from 5 to the hour until 5 past to get the top of the hour ident

That's such a useful feature. Combining a data recorder with some way of triggering that recording using certain signal characteristics (strength/pattern parameters) would be a powerful automated setup.

Ok so after some playing around, SDR Console , SDRUno and Airspy's SDRSharp all record Spectrum, I actually came across an old recording I did a while back with the SDR Play which I recorded in SDRUno and must have forgot about.

They're called IQ files or recordings.

Here's a link to about 5-6 mins of a recording of the 49 Meter Shortwave band I recorded last night. It's about 1GB recorded as a WAV file which is uncompressed.

I think I noticed SDRSharp can compress it to MP3 or WMA.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/xp39drtl6euyoh2/SDRSharp_20180320_005114Z_6280000Hz_IQ.wav?dl=0

Remember to open it in SDRConsole only as it might not work properly with SDRconsole, SDRConsole has great filtering to try out too.

You can download SDRSharp here It's called Windows SDR Software Package top one on the page.

https://airspy.com/download/

Then extract the zip to a folder called SDRSharp and then run the SDRSharp.exe , there's no installation.

On the very top of the program it says Source, click on that and select from the list IQ file WAV then select the WAV file I linked to and then select play at the top of the window beside the "cog"

I think SDRConsole is the best software to use because it's the only one really compatabile with the Airspy HF+ at this time, it will work with a plug in with SDRConsole and SDRUno but a lot of the functions are not available and it won't work properly.

So now you'll be listening to the 49 Meter SW band just as you had the HF+ and the Bonito MA305 Antenna connected and it will give people an idea of what SDR's are all about.

Remember it's only about 5 mins and will keep looping back to the start automatically, enjoy