Matter of Facts: Into the Weird World of SDR

[00:00:06] Welcome back to the Matter of Facts Podcast on the Prepper Broadcasting Network. We talk prepping guns and politics every week on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify. Go check out our content at MWFPodcast.com on Facebook or Instagram. You can support us via Patreon or by checking out our affiliate partners. I'm your host, Phil Ravelet, Andrew, Nick are on the other side of the mic, and here's your show.

[00:00:30] Welcome back to the Matter of Facts Podcast. I am once again coming to you to announce that Andrew is not with us. He has joined the Botswana Defense Force, a country so tiny and obscure I didn't think it had a defense force. But Nick, my other co-host, Googled it, and apparently they do, which I'm not sure if that makes... Actually, a pretty quality one. I'm not sure yet if that makes the joke funnier or less funny. I think it adds something to it. It does. I think it's excellent.

[00:00:59] So I guess that means the next week is back on me to come up with an excuse for Andrew not being here, and it must be something embarrassing. Yes. Ideally. Outstanding. Rackle Fraggle is in the chat. Apparently he's been there since 5 p.m., so let's do these things out of order. Good for him. Let's do these things out of order, and then we'll get back to the admin work.

[00:01:22] So if you're listening or watching this streaming live, there's an explanation for what's going on. So I have had a change in my work schedule that is going to make our usual 5 p.m. central time recording time almost impossible to reliably hit.

[00:01:44] And rather than roll the dice and press Nick into service having to tell jokes and do a stand-up routine to wait for me, we opted to back it up until after dinner instead of before dinner. This comes with one other unfortunate change. So this podcast streams on YouTube, Facebook, and Rumble. It rebroadcasts on the Prepper Broadcasting Network, and it has always been an audio podcast.

[00:02:10] So it's on all of your favorite podcast apps like Podomatic and Spotify and iTunes and yadda yadda yadda. So we've been releasing consistently on Friday morning forever, like literally for like almost nine years now, and that's going to have to change. So the audio podcast, if that's how you like to listen to this, anywhere but PBN, because PBN is going to continue to be on Monday.

[00:02:34] But everywhere else, this is going to start releasing Saturday morning, because if we're going to record this late in the evening, quite frankly, I need to be able to like record, stop, drop, and roll, and then get to bed at a reasonable hour so I can get to work the next morning because I wake up at 4 a.m. Yeah, 4.30 here. Yeah. So, you know, just one of those things where like sometimes this editing job is pretty quick and simple, and sometimes, frankly, it's hell on earth, and it takes me two and a half, three hours.

[00:03:04] It just depends on how things work out. And in the interest of not making it hell on earth at midnight, I'm going to make this a Friday afternoon job where I edit this and get it posted for Saturday morning. So for the patrons, y'all gave me your approval, and I thank you for that, and this is my moment to plug the patrons. All of you sociopaths chip in a couple of bucks a month, and it helps defray the cost so that I don't have to make this a line out.

[00:03:33] I've been the Ravely family budget, and I'm very appreciative of that. And because of that, I asked the patrons, who were all in the Signal chat together, do y'all care? And they said no. Yep. And so everybody that's not a patron, they pay the bills. They get the last word. Sorry. That's just the way it works. Well, I think we get the last word. They get a vote. Yeah. Let me do the admin work, and then we'll loop back around to that. Go for it.

[00:04:02] So I've already said thank you to the patrons. There's links to merch down in the show description. If you want to support the show, get a shirt or a koozie. You should check that out. And Cypress Survivalist is still the thing that we're doing down here in southeast Louisiana to promote the preparedness culture. We have some things that are in the works. I've got a board meeting tomorrow that we're going to hopefully hammer down a list of action items,

[00:04:28] and then I'll be able to bring some cool stuff out in the near future about that. But going back to this idea that we have the last word, y'all have to understand that my perspective on this podcast for years has always been like, I do it because the audience shows up. If the audience stops showing up, it's not fun anymore, and I don't want to do this anymore. I certainly don't do it for money. I certainly don't do it for a paycheck. And contrary to popular belief, micro internet celebrity is not really a thing.

[00:04:56] I don't walk around town and people are like, hey, that's the dude. No one knows who I am. And I like that to a degree. Yeah, I get that, man. But, you know, long-winded way of saying that, like, I do this for the audience. I do this for the patrons. And that's why I went to the patrons and genuinely asked. Like, if the show coming out on Saturday was a cause of heartburn, I'll suck it up and keep making it come out on Friday no matter what it takes. It'll hurt. It'll suck.

[00:05:23] But I would do it because I do it because the audience and the patrons asked me to. Yeah, I understand that. But you got to take care of yourself and you got to accommodate your work schedule and your life schedule. And, man, if that meant you being up until midnight doing editing work, I don't think anybody would blame you. I mean, I've stayed up much later doing much less fun things. Well, I'm sure. There is that. But, you know, you're not doing it once a week, every week for the foreseeable future. There's a difference.

[00:05:53] There's a difference between sucking up something a couple of times and doing it every Thursday night from now until whenever. Ever. Yeah. All I'm going to say is that if the patrons would have, like, put their foot down on my neck, I would have done it. Oh, I know you would have. I would harass you for doing it. But they said Saturday was cool. And I am appreciative of that because it means that I can get some sleep. And sleep is good.

[00:06:21] You know, for all of you that are on the other side of 40, I'm going to tell you that, you know, when we're young, we have this mentality like, I don't need sleep. I just need coffee. I can stay up. I can, like, survive on three hours of sleep forever. I can party all night, drag my butt and work the next morning. And let me tell you something. When you get just to this side of 40, a switch flips and things start changing.

[00:06:44] And I don't know quite why, but I do know that I tell my wife frequently, I can do everything now that I could 10 years ago, but it hurts a lot worse the next day. Like, I can still jack up her Jeep, rip all the brakes off of it, do a whole brake job. But I can do all that. I've still got my, you know, my hands and my physical ability and I've still got all my strength. But boy, I'm going to tell you, the next day I got up out of bed and I was limping around the house like my back was not happy with me.

[00:07:13] And I was like, ooh, ooh, maybe, maybe, maybe getting to that point where paying somebody to do it may not be like, you know, the worst thing on earth. I mean, I'd be humiliated as a man, but still. Hey, you know what, man? We all got to suck it up sometimes, right? Yeah. Riggle fraggle. Let me tell you something. It is not the age. It is the mileage. Some of us, some of us have led very, very interesting lives.

[00:07:41] And our bodies are now telling us all about it. Yeah. There's stuff that probably should have gotten looked at a few years back. But yeah, no, man, I'm you get up at 430 in the morning to get to work every day. You're not staying up late. Your body's just not going to want to do it. Yes. Yes. All right. So admin work done, two topics. A couple of weeks ago, this is what we call foreshadowing in the business.

[00:08:11] I made some lopsided comment about, wow, I sure hope there's another Trump slump and everybody, you know, slacks off on buying guns and ammo and I can use them in like a year or so. I can start loading up my reloading cabinet again. I can start buying ammo on the cheap because no, everyone's going to be like, yay, second amendment safe. Like they do every time a Republican gets into office.

[00:08:32] And then today, one of y'all posted this in the patron group that Trump's tariffs are impacting foreign ammunition manufacturers. Well, yeah. Yeah, I know. I know. I know. I mean, like, okay. Did anybody really not expect that to be affected? I saw it coming, but I didn't need the knife twisted. Like y'all could have just let me continue on in my ignorance.

[00:09:02] But like, this is a phenomenal example of why I have said consistently year after year after year after year, no matter who is going to win the election, all of y'all out there ought to be stacking ammo. Because every time we get, we get to like two of them, this much of that November ammunition prices start going up for reasons. Everybody gets a little nervous and all of a sudden things start getting scarce on the shelves. And then depending on which way the election goes, sometimes everybody's like, huh?

[00:09:32] And then ammunition floods back in the shelves and gets cheap or it goes, ah, and freaks out. And ammunition doubles in price for the next couple of years. Yeah. So like, this isn't completely unexpected, but damn it is an aggrave. Well, look, any time a government imposes new tariffs or new taxes, especially if it's on raw materials or any kind of foreign imports, it's going to hit ammo prices. Because to be honest, brass is expensive. Lead is expensive.

[00:10:03] The chemicals that go into primers are expensive. Congrats. And you've now added a premium on top of that. So I have to address this. Riggle Fraggle said he just saw primers for $45 a brick though. You better go buy a couple of those right now. Because unfortunately, what always happens in the animation manufacturing business, you have to understand that like there's only so many places.

[00:10:27] Well, not just that, but like there's only so many places in the world that make powder, for example. Like all of your gunpowders, they're not made by guys with big luxurious beards in their garage. They're made in freaking refineries. Places like, you know, names like DuPont. Yep. Large chemical refineries, ideally located very far from cities. Yes. But my point is that there's only so many places in the world they make powder.

[00:10:53] They make a huge run of powder and then they do a turnaround and they make another huge run of a different kind of powder with slightly different characteristics. That is why shortages on your personal pet powder can last sometimes for half a year. Because congrats, you happened to hit the tail end of that batch. I haven't found my personal pet pistol powder in seven years.

[00:11:21] I bought so much off of a dead guy that I have not had to buy powder in 10 years. Yeah. Yeah. Now, don't get it twisted. I've still got half of that eight pound jug and I have plenty of other stuff I can press and service alone nine mil. I mean, this is a beautiful thing about loading pistol rounds is that when you have like a little little juge of like four and a half grains of powder in your case, eight pounds last a long time.

[00:11:47] But my point is, is that six loads or 300 wind mag loads. Yeah. And that's also, but this is the reason why recently not, not just the cost of primers, the cost of primers, the difficulty finding powders I want. I've gotten to the point where it is with the cost and the time investment and the time investment is becoming more of an issue now. Yeah.

[00:12:11] Because when, you know, when I first started down the reloading road, when I first started down the preparedness road, I was really heavy in on firearms. And since then I have like really diverse. I mean, obviously I've diversified myself. That's the primary topic, but I've stuck my nose in all these different little facets of preparedness. And as a result of that, my time is split in a bunch of different directions. Now I don't have hours upon hours to sit in the garage and just load nine millimeter. It serves me no purpose.

[00:12:40] I'd rather go buy a thousand rounds of it and, you know, a penny around more than what it would cost me to reload it and save the time. Like I was telling somebody recently at this point, I would reload ammo. It was something I couldn't buy. I have a couple of, I have a couple of pet loads. Can't buy them. Yep. Can't buy them anywhere for any amount of money. I have to make them myself.

[00:13:01] I have a couple that they're published low data, but no one makes these, these, no one makes these cartridge and a bullet combinations. Like I've got a 90 grain Hornady XTP nine millimeter. Why? I see your brow. Why? Nick, do you know what happens when you take a 90 grain Hornady XTP hollow point and you zap it down the barrel at 1450 feet a second?

[00:13:29] Other than messing up your, your barrel due to extra barrel erosion. No. Shot a bunch of through my barrel. Not only is that the most accurate round out of both of my CZs, not only is it, not only is it within Sammy specs for plus for nine millimeter plus P it is the, it is one of the most accurate loads out of a variety of nine millimeter pistols I've shot. Yes. It is a very, very light.

[00:13:57] It's a very light bullet and it's a very short stubby bullet. I mean, it's, it's literally as tall as it is wide. It would, it would have to be. But 1450 feet a second. That is impressive. When I was, when I was doing load development for this thing, halfway through the powder charges, I heard it go supersonic and I kept pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing.

[00:14:20] And normally, well, and you might've had different experience than I have, but my experience with load development is usually that when you get to you, as you go up in the, uh, in your charge weight, you normally hit a point where like, your accuracy, your, your, your, your group shrinks, reach your most accurate point. And then to push past that, it starts widening out again. Right. Uh, it depends, depends on the cartridge and, and the, and the weapons platform on, uh, on rifles. I have noticed that a little bit.

[00:14:50] Once you get too fast with a rifle bullet for your twist rate, it becomes a problem. Not so much an issue with, with, uh, handgun rounds though. Right. Uh, you know, I've never really pushed super high velocities with my handguns. Uh, most of the time I go with heavier projectiles rather than lighter. So what I will tell you is that this round, the groups got tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter all the way to a max charge.

[00:15:17] And then the max charge was 1440 some feet per second over the chronograph. It was, it's a, we, it's a weird round. It's a 380 ACP bullet. That's what I was thinking. But I found low data for it in nine mil. And I love that. It fits down the barrel. If it fits its ships, but yeah. Yeah. But here's the thing. I can't buy anywhere. Nobody makes it. Well, of course they don't. It's a 380 ACP round. I mean, I, in reality it is.

[00:15:47] And for the same reason, nobody makes the 308, the, the match grade 308 round that I have. It's tuned exactly to my barrel that will group in the, that'll make four rounds touch at a hundred yards. That's my odd six. Nobody makes wind mag. Yeah. So at this stage, I'm in the mode of, if I can't buy it off the store shelves, I will make it. Sure. But if I can buy it off the store shelves, like if I just want a thousand rounds of five, five, six go plinking with, I have to start asking myself, I have to start doing a cost benefit analysis about.

[00:16:16] Well, five, five, six was always a hard, a hard one to even break even on reloading. Just, just due to the, the amount of powder that you end up going through and the projectiles aren't the cheapest. I mean, they're not expensive, but unless you're buying them like 10,000 at a time, you're really not getting any kind of bulk discount. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:16:34] And at that point to make like, to, to make the, the financial numbers on something like bulk five, five, six work, you have to either not count your time as having any value, which for most of it does. Or you have to go get a progressive press. And the minute you get that, you're talking about tripling the cost of your reloading press. Plus you're talking about going through hundreds or thousands of dollars in components.

[00:17:02] And I just don't have that volume of cash to stuff into that anymore. So I've gotten to the point where I'm going to start being very picky about what I reload, but long and long story made short. There will be no Trump slump, at least not for the time being. Not for the ammo market anyway. No, not for the ammo market and guns. We'll see if ammo gets too expensive guns might get cheaper. Hard to say.

[00:17:30] Hard to say, but we ain't going to see a Trump slump like I was hoping for. No, not at least not in the ammo market. I don't think. Although this is a wonderful time to point out that with the exception of a few people that I know, like the guys from Phoenix Ammunition, there are precious few companies here in the United States that load their own that load our ammo locally. And there I don't believe there are any places here in the US that manufacture our own powder or primers. Powder. Yes. Powder. Yes. Where? Where?

[00:18:01] Wasn't Hod. Oh, shoot. I can't remember how to pronounce. I know for a fact, Hodgkin was getting a lot of their powder manufactured in Australia. Were they? At some point, I know. I thought a few years ago, one of their plants caught fire in New Mexico. Okay. I'd have to do some looking into. I know at one point, a lot of their powder was coming from overseas. Well, maybe I'm wrong. It's been a long time since I've looked into it.

[00:18:26] Now, primers, I'm pretty sure we don't have a local source of those because I remember some scuttlebutt from the Lodon community a couple of years ago where. Oh, geez. Italy, we can't allow them from. Yeah. Apparently, a group of people were like pooling money and getting loans trying to see if they could get the EPA to allow them to make a primer manufacturer plant here in the US because we didn't have one anywhere in the country. For whatever reason. Yeah. Why would we need to make critical wartime materials here in our own country?

[00:18:55] That's some weird stuff. Yeah, we'll see. But does anyone make powder in South America? Let me look. Okay. Okay. You look. I'll start talking. So, the banner, the topic for this show. Phil learned a new trick. So, let's start off with a bit of conversation before I start to screen share and like do a show and tell with y'all.

[00:19:23] So, I've done a couple episodes about my radio nerd journey and radios are cool and fun and everything I'm going to talk about today about software defined radio or SDR is not meant to be a replacement for radios because I think whatever radio service you like you really should have at least a radio in that radio service.

[00:19:48] But I started dipping my toe into SDR mostly because when I did the communications class for Cypress Survivalist, I talked about the radio services, some about the equipment. I talked a lot about comm security and signals intelligence. And over the course of doing that class, I realized that there were things I wanted to integrate into the class that I hadn't originally.

[00:20:13] So, that was a chance for me to go back and do some more research and bring some new tricks to the table so that the next time I teach that class, it's got a little bit more meat to it. And y'all get to be my test dummy. So, thanks. Amen. So, what SDR is, for those that don't know, software defined radio. The idea is that if you have a radio, it has a transceiver in it and it tunes according to the hardware.

[00:20:41] Software defined radio means that you have software, a computer program that is doing your tuning, that is modulating your bandwidth, that is doing all of your decoding and all your modulating. It's all dealt with in software. Now, what this does is it makes, first of all, it makes SDR a fairly cheap thing to get into. All you need is like one of these little USB dongles, which you can get on Amazon for like 30 bucks.

[00:21:07] Or you could spend like 10 or 12 bucks more and you get this and some antennas and some other things that are fairly useful and are worth the money. And one SDR will get you into this weird little world of like abandoned ware and pet projects and radio nerd nonsense they put on GitHub. So, it's a, you have to be prepared.

[00:21:33] So, to get into software defined radio, you have to be prepared to like indulge yourself in a bit of a science project. Because there is no like Microsoft SDR suite. It's a lot of these little programs that are just scattered on the internet that somebody cooked up and then put out there for the community. And they've had varied degrees of work done on them. You're going to have to do some fooling around with them to figure out how to make them work and how to make them behave themselves on your equipment.

[00:22:03] I've got an old Windows 10 loaded laptop. Doesn't take a lot of really serious bit of hardware to run them in it. This thing runs it just fine. But, um, I will say that in between like finding the right DLL files, some of which I had to go find on the internet or random places, uh, getting the proper drivers loaded. There was, there was a learning curve with this. If I remember right, you started playing with it about a week and a half, two weeks ago.

[00:22:32] About that. Yeah. You got all the hardware in and then you started dinking around with the software. Yeah. And by the time I'd gotten to just before last episode, I had a couple, I think I had two out of these three programs running. Okay. One was still fighting me and it was still fighting me until Friday afternoon. I finally, finally got the thing to like behave itself. That's a story all to itself.

[00:23:00] If I remember right, that was a driver issue, wasn't it? Kind of. So I had, let's, let's, let's remind me later to address that when we get to, um, when we get to RTL 1090 and the ADSB programs, because that was the one that was really, that was the most fun to get running. Okay. But in any case, so let's do this and start the show and tell.

[00:23:31] Let's do that. Let's do that. Me and Nick will go away for the moment. That'll work. So it's also worth pointing out. And let me throw this up real quick. That is the, uh, two of the antennas that came with, uh, the SDR. And those are currently sitting on the other side of my room attached to my laptop. Neat.

[00:24:02] Now, kind of the cool part about SDR is if I'd have been thinking ahead, I would have. Yeah, we'll do that. That'll work. That way you don't have matter of facts hanging across everything. Oh yeah. So the thing about SDR is. Yeah, the thing about SDR and the thing that makes it a bit tricky to utilize is that you are 100%. I liken this very much to the difference between buying ammunition off the store shelf and reloading it.

[00:24:30] The cool thing about reloading is that you can make things happen that you can't buy. You can't just go buy off the store shelf. Like my analogy earlier about the 90 gray and Hornady XTP in the 9mm round. But the problem is if you don't take the time to fool with the software and tweak it and play with it, then you wind up not getting great results out. So like that's why I started off by saying that I would never encourage someone to not get a radio. Get a radio. Get a couple of radios.

[00:24:59] You can scan frequencies with those things. You can hunt around. You can do all kinds of things. And in some ways, if I wanted to do what I'm doing right now, this is 98.5 FM, which is my local FM station. Bear with me. I'm just looking for a stronger one.

[00:25:30] 101.9 is pretty haste out. Mm-hmm. So the reason y'all aren't hearing this, by the way, is because I have that laptop muted so that y'all don't hear horrible echoing. Because we tried to do this and have system audio before the show started, but there was too many things going on. The echo was horrible. The echo was horrifying, and I had already sipped too much of this whiskey to try to figure out too many ways around it. But anyway. I suppose if we had a video recording of it, you could do that then.

[00:25:59] Yeah, but I didn't want to do that just in case there was somebody in the chat that had a question. I want to be able to do this more on the fly. Exactly. Exactly. But the thing of it is, is that right now, for this one use case, I want to listen to the local FM station. You could do this on AM-FM radio. Probably faster than you can get this program stood up. You literally just get the radio, spin the dial until you find a station. Done deal. You can do that on most of these GMRs radios, by the way.

[00:26:27] Most of them have an FM mode, so you can just listen to your local FM stations. Like, those things are not difficult. What SDR does, what intrigued me, was the ability to do things you can't do with a standard radio.

[00:26:48] So, looking at this signal, by the way, you can see on the right side of that band, there's a really sharp line right there, and it's pretty consistent, right? Yeah. My suspicion is that without digging into it, and I don't have a digital decoding software on here yet, my suspicion is that it's probably an HD radio station. Oh, okay. So, really narrow, high amplitude.

[00:27:17] Yeah, and you can see... Oh, yeah. There's one there, too. Over here, you've got the same thing. You've got this normal waterfall, and then you have this one really sharp peak right in the middle of it. My suspicion is that's probably a digital signal just by looking at it. Okay, so you can do a little bit of signals analysis without even listening to it, then.

[00:27:54] Bear with me. I goofed something up. Yep. Same thing here. You've got a little bit of a sideband there and another one over here on this side on either side of 105.3, which is one of our local FM stations that's also the rebroadcast for 870 AM. So, that's like our local talk radio station.

[00:28:20] But the thing of it is, is that if you look down in these waterfalls, there's obviously something on either side of that center frequency, and whatever it is, it's not FM modulation. It's a weird... I mean, just by looking at it, looking at the waterfall, you can tell that there's something there. And this is one of those things that SDR allows you to do, is that it puts a face on what you're hearing.

[00:28:44] And it allows you to see things in the radio spectrum that ordinarily you would never have any inclination there if you just took a radio dial and spun the tuning dial. Now, go ahead. So, if that's not FM modulation there that we're seeing, those two rectangular peaks, what would you guess that that is? Because I have honestly no idea. My guess, just from glancing at a little bit of experience, probably digital signal. Okay.

[00:29:13] So, a different variation, like a wideband digital signal, you think? Yeah, very possibly. Okay. But the only reason I say that is because, like, you can just take one look at this and the way it's moving around and everything, and that is very obviously an analog signal. Yeah. But then on either side of it, those are not analog signals just by looking at the waterfall. Yeah, it definitely doesn't look analog, but I was just curious. Like I said, I don't have digital decoding software on here yet.

[00:29:43] It's one of my action items to play with as I dig further into this, and that's kind of the... That's going to be a theme here, is that of the things I've already learned how to do with SDR, there are other things that I'm poking my nose further into, which some of it's like hobbyist stuff, and some of it might genuinely be useful.

[00:30:03] But at the end of the day, to me, the real take all away from this very first program, which, by the way, this is SDR Sharp, and this is just your basic garden variety software-defined radio package. It allows you to look at the entire radio frequency bandwidth, all the way, I think, up to, like, 1.7 gigahertz or something crazy like that, all the way down in HF. Interesting. Interesting.

[00:30:30] So with this, you can do things like listen to local AM, FM stations. You can check in on your local airport if you switch thing to AM and you start listening to air band. You can start listening to the local ham radio nets on HF. You can start listening to – there's a use case for this, although I haven't really – this isn't really packaged to be able to do it.

[00:30:52] But there is a use case for SDR to use it to basically look for, like, hidden cameras and stuff because they all – they all, you know, usually they output on about 900 megahertz. Oh, okay. That would make sense.

[00:31:05] So you can, like, go take your local – you know, go into, let's say, an Airbnb, unplug the wireless – the Wi-Fi router, and then you can start with a – you know, with a little bit of attenuation and directional antenna, start looking around for signals coming from things that shouldn't have Wi-Fi signals coming out of them. Interesting. Interesting.

[00:31:24] So that could be – that actually could be fairly useful then, especially, say, if you, you know, if you do happen to stay in a lot of Airbnbs or if you're just looking to find other people that are broadcasting around you in a situation where you're trying to grab local intelligence. You can – you know, you've got your published radio stations. You can eliminate those right off the crack. You've got your published ham repeaters, GMRS repeaters, FMRS, and I think there's, like, one other one.

[00:31:56] But if you see anything outside of that, could be worth a listen. Yeah, and more importantly, like, obviously I've got the audio disabled on this, but for most of these signals, if I wanted to listen in on them, all you have to do is click on that speaker icon. And then whatever your frequency is centered on, you'll start listening to immediately.

[00:32:20] So what SDR Sharp does in a nutshell is this is – oh, I have to address this. Jim, I never get the notifications. YouTube shenanigans. Yeah. I mean, that's YouTube shenanigans, but we did move the recording time for the streams from now on from 5 p.m. Central back to 7.30 Central on Thursdays, and that'll be a thing from now on. Yeah, it's just going to be at 7.30, just so that we can give time for everybody to get home from work, have a bite to eat, you know.

[00:32:50] It makes everybody's life a little easier. Yeah. Most importantly, it gives me time to actually get home from my new work schedule. That's true. Otherwise, he would have to be broadcasting from the road in his car. Not a good idea. But, yeah, like I was saying, so that's kind of SDR Sharp in a nutshell. Is passing from the car a ticketable offense? I know being on your cell phone is, but – I don't want to find out. I don't want to find out.

[00:33:20] I don't want to find out. I should consult my attorney. You can try it in Illinois and let me know. I'll consult my attorney instead. It'll be way quicker. Everything is illegal in Illinois if it's even remotely fun. You know this. That's not entirely inaccurate. All right. So, like I said, that's SDR Sharp in a nutshell.

[00:33:43] SDR Sharp will let you creep in on all of your local radio frequencies and not just FM. FM, AM, wideband, narrowband, single sideband. There's one other. But it'll let you hunt through the radio bands and look for things so that you can listen to them.

[00:34:09] And as long as you have the appropriate software, like I said, I don't have digital decoding software yet. It's on the list. But if I did, then those couple of sidebands that we were seeing on either side of the FM stations that I'm pretty sure are HD radio signals, we could have poked our head in and listened to them. Or really any digital signal. Interesting. So, what SDR Sharp does is it gives you kind of a base layer. It is, in many ways, it is a hobbyist.

[00:34:36] I just want to play around with this new thing and see what I can see kind of thing. But I do feel like it has the capability to offer you information. And information is always useful if you find a way to use it. Yeah, even just knowing there's a signal out there. Even if you can't listen to it yet, you know to look for it in the future to listen to it. Yep. Remember me telling you about Radio Nerd Abandonware command line. Yeah. Love it.

[00:35:10] Oh, yeah. This definitely looks like one dude did it in his basement. Almost certainly. But give me a moment while I make sure I've got this spun up. So, this is a program called SDR Trunk. Which, years and years ago, you could...

[00:35:37] Give me a second. I can't multitask that well, apparently. That's all right. PCG saying that there's a wiki that helps you identify radio signals, examples of sounds, waterfall images. He's going to send the link over. So, that would be fantastic. Cool. Thanks for looking out, man.

[00:35:59] Oh, and for anybody who happens to run across this, PCG, Partisan Comms Group, the Comms Syndicate, if you're into radio nerd stuff, those are my radio nerds. They're going to cost me a significant amount of money. I mean, they might cost you a lot in ham gear. I'm trying to cost you a lot in night vision. So, you know, somewhere between the two of us will bounce.

[00:36:24] But I'm just saying, like, if I have radio questions, those are the boys I go to because they put me to shame by far. They absolutely have a phenomenal knowledge base. Yeah. But, so this is a program called SDR Trunk. And yes, Nick, it was probably made by one person in their basement. This is not Microsoft levels of polish. No, but it looks very functional. Yeah.

[00:36:50] So, let's start with the explanation of what this is while the audience goes, ooh, ah. So, a long, long time ago, Barney Fife and his buddies would talk on an analog radio, pretty much like the rest of us still do. You know, like you would call dispatch and they would have a radio and they'd talk to you on your radio on one frequency and everything was nice and simple to listen in on.

[00:37:13] And then, insert rambling about police state and weaponization of police and, you know, police budgets expanding gratuitously and the number of cops growing infinitesimally. Anyway, back to the topic.

[00:37:29] Basically, there's so many law enforcement officers, so many first responders that are all trying to talk to each other all the time that the available bandwidth for public service radio is no longer enough to cover the number of talk groups they need. Hasn't been for a long time. Fair enough.

[00:38:17] Right. I'd get on channel one to talk to you, channel two to talk to her. But now, I would need a channel for you, a channel for her, a channel for my daughter, a channel for your wife, a channel for all, you know, one channel each for like 15 other people. And we just ran out of channels. So, this is where trunk radio systems come in. This is what this thing is you're looking at over here. That makes sense. The way a trunk radio system is works is that there is one. In reality, there's a couple. There's like one primary and multiple alternate control channels.

[00:38:48] And that channel sends out a digital signal to every radio that is on that trunk radio system. And it says, Phil, Nick, y'all are in talk group A. Switch to channel one to talk to each other. Okay. And then we talk. And then when we're done, it releases that channel back into the queue. And then if I try to call my wife, I key up and I'm keying up on say talk group B for me and my wife.

[00:39:17] The control channel tells me and my wife and your radio, by the way, hey, if you're in talk group B, go to channel one because channel one is clear. Right. So, you have one channel on a digital signal that is telling all the radios on that net. If you're in this talk group, you need to be on this channel to hear this conversation. And in doing so, you can have 20, 30, 40 talk groups on only four or five channels.

[00:39:41] That makes sense because eventually you're going to hit the bandwidth limitation of that, but it's going to happen a lot slower. Yeah. Well, and the thing of it is, is that with this, we have the capability of expanding a set number of channels to handle dozens, if not hundreds of talk groups. Right. And that's what this is on this side.

[00:40:08] So, over here on the other screen, you can see that yellow channel that says control. For the moment that channel is keyed up on that frequency, of course, it goes to idle as soon as I look at it. Come on. Somebody say something. There it goes. 7, 17, 16, 875, I think it was. Yep. So, that's your primary control channel.

[00:40:34] And it is telling, and as those, the rest of those signals come in and say call, that is somebody who's trying to call their talk group. So, the control channel tells everybody on that talk group, switch to this channel, and then the conversation happens. If, during the time that is happening, another talk group comes in, then the control channel says, okay, y'all are having this conversation on channel one, channel two goes to this talk group. And it just cycles through them. So, this is frequency hopping, but not in the way the military does it.

[00:41:03] The military does frequency hopping to make it difficult to hear the conversation because they jump a channel every so many tenths of a second, right? Yeah, up or down. Yeah, this is frequency hopping to expand a set number of channels to handle multiple other purposes. So, if you had, let's say, a digital, if you had a digital radio and you just put it on one of these frequencies and just sat there and listened, you would eventually hear a conversation.

[00:41:32] You just wouldn't necessarily hear every conversation happening in that net. Yeah. Now, here's the frustrating part. You're probably seeing a pink label pop up right now that says encrypted. Yeah. So, in addition to trunk radio systems, a lot of law enforcement agencies have started encrypting their transmissions. And unfortunately, my local law enforcement community has encrypted their transmissions.

[00:42:00] So, even with SDR trunk, I can't hear what they're saying. I can't listen to dispatch. I can't listen to the local sheriff's department. Oddly enough, the state police are not encrypted. Don't ask me why. That's a little confusing to me. It's probably a budgetary thing with how large of an outfit they are. Because it requires all new radios, I do believe, to go to encrypted radio traffic. I believe so.

[00:42:21] But the one thing that stood out to me, and the reason I still think this has utility, and I'll just say that if you're curious about the trunk radio systems in your area, radio reference.com has some amazing databases that can show you, are there trunk radio systems in your area? What talk groups are and are not encrypted? So, you can figure out, is the juice worth the squeeze?

[00:42:43] If memory serves me, if you look through the talk groups, there's a field, and it'll say D, if it's a digital signal, and DE, if it's digital encrypted. If it's encrypted, not only can you not listen to it, but it's illegal to try to. So, you know, just color inside the lines or don't tell me about it. I have feelings about public servants encrypting their radio traffic. Oh, you dirty libertarian, you.

[00:43:12] That sounds like something I would say. Well, I just feel like if the police are doing their jobs correctly, they should not need to encrypt their radio traffic from us. I don't disagree with that sentiment, but I will say this. If there's an organization out there actively targeting police and doing violence to them through their radio traffic, that sounds like an illegal act that should be policed. As opposed to just listening because you're a nerd? Yeah.

[00:43:42] I mean, like, look, if somebody is out there actively trying to harm police officers, that is an illegal act in and of itself. It doesn't matter that they're doing it via radio. Yeah. But now the thing I was going to point out was that even though my local dispatch and LEOs are all encrypted, there's a number of organizations that are not. Fire departments are not. Fire departments around here are not encrypted.

[00:44:08] And it's really useful to be able to listen to them if you want to know why the hell you're hearing sirens running around all over the place. Yeah. The state police are not encrypted. Every organization has a set number of interoperability channels where, like, if the state police and the sheriff's department had to coordinate on something, they would all get on a shared interop channel. And those are usually not encrypted. None of those are encrypted. And I was thinking to myself, like, how could that be useful?

[00:44:37] And the truth of the matter is that if there's anything going on that's big enough to get the sheriff's NOPD, St. Tammany Parish and, like, the local cops all screaming at each other, it's probably something I'd like to know about. And that those channels are not encrypted. That's fair. So, like, to me, this should come as no great shock to anybody who's known me for more than 15 seconds. This is an intelligence gathering apparatus to me. Absolutely.

[00:44:59] This is the ability to fire up a laptop, plug in two SDRs, because you need two of them, unfortunately. You need one to read the control and you need one to read all the talk channels. Yeah. Actually. Yep.

[00:45:24] If you sit there and look at that screen right there, it's telling you what the two SDRs are doing right now. Interesting. It's flipping back and forth. And I was under the mistaken impression that, like, one SDR was just a control channel and one SDR was just the talk channel. But looking at this for a while, it switches back and forth. Interesting. It's running them back. It's running the two of them in parallel, which doesn't matter to anybody who's not a massive nerd.

[00:45:53] But the point remains is that you have to have two, which means you also need two antennas. But you need all that so that you can listen to the control channel and the talk channels. And in practice, when you're listening to this, you'll have a couple of minutes of just dead air where nobody's talking. And the next thing you know, you just get it just starts firing. Interesting. Interesting.

[00:46:26] So, yeah, that is SDR trunk. There's also another program called Unitrunker, which some people prefer. I didn't fool with it. This is the one I latched onto. And you'll find that there's not many of these programs. I'm going to say this is the one to get because truthfully, this is the one that worked on my ancient old hodgepodge laptop. Jesus Christ. Well, crap. Start over. I was chatting with Phil's wife and missed the start. Stuart.

[00:46:55] I literally warned you all in the Patreon chat. Five minutes out. He voted for this. He did. He did vote in favor of 730 p.m. Because it'd be easier for him to watch. He voted for this and he was still late. That's all right. He likes he likes to give us some sass. That's that's really what it is. Joe, technically, it is radio computer stuff. It is. Yes, Joe, this is radio and computer stuff. So the worst of both worlds. Yeah.

[00:47:26] If if if you think radios are witchcraft and you think computers were made by the devil, you might just want to like walk away now. But on the other hand, I think it's pretty cool. And y'all know how I am about like Intel, you know, signals intelligence, like every opportunity to learn stuff around the ability, every opportunity to learn about the information. Learn information about the world around you is like a happy meal as far as I'm concerned. Yes. Yes, Joe. Witchcraft sorcery.

[00:47:54] This is this is like teaching a druid necromancy. Yes. If you like that analogy. Okay. So last but not least. Now this this bears a conversation. Go for it. That's so this program. This program was the bane of my existence for several days.

[00:48:23] This is a program called RTL 1090. Now 1090 because all of your aircraft carrier responder signals broadcast on 1090 megahertz 1090. And this program does one thing and one thing only. It listens to exactly that frequency and it reports all of those messages that are being beamed down to these antennas in my room by local aircraft that are flying within the area.

[00:48:53] Four of them at the moment. Interesting. And if we want something that's like kind of useful, we could flip over to this table view. Where it's coalescing all those signals into a list of the aircraft that is tracking. And then if we want something slightly more useful than that.

[00:49:16] We can fire up the scope, which I currently have set to roughly my home as the as the home location. That makes sense. And those little blips are aircraft flying around my house. Interesting. Aircrafts with active transponders. Yes. Which now here's the thing about that.

[00:49:41] Most aircraft have train most aircraft above a certain size already have a transponder. And according to what I was hearing just recently, apparently there was a rule put in place by the FAA last year that is mandating transponders in all air, all private aircraft. Commercial aircraft were already required to have. Sure. I wonder if they're going to do that with drones as well. That I don't know. I mean.

[00:50:07] Because they've already started to put some pretty stringent rules in places with the drone flying. Just because of people doing tomfoolery. Yeah. But like I said, that is RTL 1090 in a nutshell. You can see a visual map representation of my local area. I could actually reset the home location anywhere I wanted or I could just scroll around.

[00:50:34] But what you're seeing there is the aircraft that it is saying are there based on the ADS-B or the transponder signals that that intent is picking up above me. And based on testing, it looks like I've got about a 40, 50 mile range. That's actually pretty impressive. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's an antenna here in the house. If I was outside, probably get a little bit better. Or if I had an antenna of like 40 or 50 feet of mass height. Right. Even better. Yeah. That'd be a significant improvement in your reception.

[00:51:04] But here's the thing. That's only moderately useful because you can't even hardly read that. I mean, I could put my nose against the screen and still can't read that. And the map doesn't get a lot bigger than that. Until you fire up this other program called Virtual Radar Server. Oh, so you have to run one to run the other? Yeah. So RTL 1090 actually snatches all those messages. All Virtual Radar Server does.

[00:51:35] So somebody made a better overlay for 1090. Actually, it made a better overlay for this and for another program called Dump 1090, which does roughly the same thing. But Bob's your uncle. Oh, look at that. That's very useful. And now I can click on that and tell you that that is a 737 operated by Southwest Airlines. I could even tell you that. Interesting.

[00:52:08] Apparently, it took off from Louis Armstrong and it's heading to Nashville. I'm not sure what my use case would be for that. But if you have everything else already rigged up to do this, adding on. I mean, I know you had a problem with this one, Phil. And I believe we discussed it being drivers.

[00:52:35] What actually ended up being the problem that stopped us from working? Okay. So the problem, the issue, the difficulty was. Remember how I started off by saying that most of these programs were built by radio nerds as passion projects? So they're not really like Microsoft levels of perfection and polish. This one in particular, the downloader did not include the downloader, which is a batch file, by the way.

[00:53:03] And by the way, if loading sketchy software onto your main computer gives you the heebie-jeebies, you should not play with any of this stuff because all of this software comes from sketchy places. Fantastic. That's why it's on a laptop with no PII or financial data. You just had a plane appear out of nowhere.

[00:53:28] Actually, so what happened was you see where that bird is relative to my location, that blue dot right there? It's probably because the antenna is right outside of a window. Ah. So. But it's only flying at 14,000 feet too. So anyway. But so what happened was the downloader for this was a batch file.

[00:53:53] And that batch file apparently goes to different places on the Internet to download different driver packages, DLL files. And two of them. That's all kinds of sketchy. I did start off by saying that. Now, I will say that these these packages are fairly well known in the SDR community. So like there are certain places where it is fairly safe to go to for these things because the community would have would have screamed bloody murder about it by now.

[00:54:24] And all the packages I'm using, like none of these came from like Russian spoof sites or anything like these came from pretty, pretty well accepted by the SDR community places. OK. But two of the DLL files had to be downloaded and they were they were directed at dead links. So I was missing. I think it was LibSub dot DLL and RTL SDR DLL. OK. Now, I found I followed the instructions I found in another guide about where to go find them.

[00:54:54] And I downloaded those DLL files and put them in there. And RTL 1090 promptly did not work like categorically refused to do anything. It would connect to the SDR. It would not find any aircraft. And I had no gain control. Interesting. So you can see here like there's my gain. Right. Right.

[00:55:22] And here's a little slider with a gain and tuner AGC and RTL AGC. That's the automatic gain control. Well, those were both. You could turn those on or off, but you couldn't turn the gain up. So what was happening was something in the DLL files was screwed up. And as a result. The gain for the SDR was set at zero and could not be raised. That's not helpful.

[00:55:49] And even when you said to automatic gain control, the gain would not raise. I literally brought this setup outside to the New Orleans lakefront on the Mandeville side. Right. I had an aircraft flying over my head. And this thing couldn't pick it up. Well, I mean, if the gain is set to zero, then you read nothing. That's. Yeah. So in the course of trying to troubleshoot that.

[00:56:16] And this is a cautionary tale for all of you that want to play with this stuff. I had two different SDRs, tried them both. That didn't work. I had five different antennas, including this one that I purchased that is tuned for 1090 megahertz. And by the way, it works very well. I mean, it's just a little bit of a thing. Screws right on the end of the SDR. I'm currently using the little dipole that came with it. And I've tested this and that back to back. And they literally track the exact same number of aircraft at the same time.

[00:56:46] Nice. Like this might work well, and this is certainly convenient to just be able to like screw into an SDR, plug it in the side of a laptop when I'm sitting outside and not have like, you know, a cable and an antenna and stuff to set up. But this was not any better than that dipole with the dipole's length set to what it needed to be. But anyway. But it occurred to me in testing two different SDRs, all the different antennas.

[00:57:13] I tested RTL 1090 and Dump 1090, so two different programs. Kept having the same problem. And then it occurred to me, the drivers. That's the one thing that was common in all these. Because what I did in an effort to like stupid proof my installs was that when I installed SDR sharp, it is installed to its own directory with its own DLL files, with its own driver packages.

[00:57:39] And then when I did SDR trunk, I did that in another drive with another set of drivers. Like I copied all the drivers and everything. It worked from SDR sharp because it worked. And I made another directory, put all that stuff over there for SDR trunk, and I loaded that. But I had these two things completely compartmentalized so that one wouldn't screw up the other.

[00:58:01] And I did the same thing for RTL 1090, except when I did RTL 1090, I didn't copy those two DLL files from the other programs that I knew they were working for. Because like a smart guy, I followed the instructions and got them from some weird place on the internet. So when I grabbed those two DLL files from the SDR sharp folder, because that one was working, and I dropped them into RTL 1090 and hit the start button, it ran perfectly. Track 5 aircraft. Interesting.

[00:58:30] I wonder if you just got a bad file or a corrupted file for those two DLLs. That's kind of my suspicion. One or both of them was corrupted. The best I can tell you is that, like, learn from my stupid mistake. And I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with having, like, compartmentalizing these install packages and different drives and doing a copy-paste of those DLL files. That way each one has their own. They're all running independently, which is where they can't fool each other.

[00:58:57] But I would say that once you have a program, like, once you have SDR sharp and it's running and it's behaving itself well with your SDR, if ever you install another program and it needs those DLL files, copy-paste it from SDR sharp. Okay. That makes sense. You know those are working. You know they're playing well with your SDR equipment. Don't do what I did and have to learn the hard way because that was, like, several days of why isn't this stupid thing working? Hmm.

[00:59:28] And unfortunately, those files are kind of a black box unless you really understand the coding, which I don't. Right. I am not a computer coder. I am, like, you have to bear in mind that, like, a lot of my skill set, which is, I guess, part personality and part, like, you know, work, is I'm very good at poking and prodding the black box until it does what I want it to do. Sure. You know, like, I do a lot of application testing for work.

[00:59:56] And I'm not a developer, which sometimes is a help because I don't understand what's behind the curtain. I don't know what Oz looks like. Well, that's ideal for somebody who's doing testing because if you have somebody that understands how it works, they can guess their way through it easier. And for me, what I do is I know that if I push this button, this happens. And if I pull this lever, this happens. And if I turn this dial, this happens.

[01:00:19] And through enough cataloging of the inputs, outputs, I figure out how the black box works, even though I don't understand how it works. Yeah, you may not understand the gears inside the box, but you understand how to get what you need out of it. Precisely. So this is kind of like the last thing that I fool with was RTL 1090 and virtual radar server. You know, this is it's been pointed out. A couple of you point out to me like, hey, I've got FlightAware or AirNav.

[01:00:48] They do the exact same thing. And I'm like, kind of. So understand that when you when you go to FlightAware, either on the website or on your app or whatever, you are looking at this. You're looking at a networked group of these little ADS-B receivers all around the country. And what FlightAware does is aggregate all the data. Interesting. Interesting.

[01:01:14] So what I have here is FlightAware without FlightAware. This is what's in my local area that I'm receiving through this antenna and this hardware and this software right now in real time flying above my head. So if the Internet's out and by the way, the other thing I did was I started I put a plug into this that allows me to cache. Excuse me. It allows me to cache the map tiles. Oh, OK.

[01:01:43] So I don't necessarily have to have the Internet to look at this in a local area. And also RTL 1090 has the scope feature, which gives you kind of a really stripped down version of this where you can at least see your aircraft position over a map overlay. And that is also independent of the Internet. Nice. I was like that. I mean, that is kind of like one thing. This is literally taking all these map tiles from Google Map. So you can cache those.

[01:02:11] So you don't have to have Internet connection. But even if. Go ahead. What is the file size to cache your local area? Is it negligible like on a modern hard drive?

[01:02:46] Oddly enough, it hasn't requested anything in a while. I would have to go back and take a look. No worries. I was just curious. I'm guessing it's probably fairly small because it looks like a lo-fi map. A lo-fi map tile. I can tell you honestly, bud, this is not a really high performance laptop. It is older than hell. And it has Windows 10 on it because that was an upgrade for Windows 7. I'm wondering if you couldn't make yourself a Pi box.

[01:03:16] Like a Raspberry Pi box self-contained system. Running this all through Linux. And then have yourself a little Go box. So let me go ahead and take that down. Take this down. I think we're done playing with SDR. I think so. So what I was going to say was it's actually not uncommon, especially for the ADS-B reception to run these off of Raspberry Pi. Pi 3 is most common.

[01:03:45] I mean, it doesn't take a tremendous amount of horsepower to just log that data. Right. And then upload it to a website or put it on a sheet or something. That's not difficult. That's commonly done with Raspberry Pis.

[01:04:00] I've actually been looking at, so in the name of full disclosure, I have only played around with Raspberry Pis to the degree that Stuart built me a data logger to read electrical signals. So I could do some testing on some of my stuff with it, with the man pack. Nice. And even he had to build that thing for me and walk me through it. I know nothing about Raspberry Pis. They're not that bad.

[01:04:26] But in the course of messing around with SDRs, I've kind of developed a bit of interest in them because it's a very common thing, apparently, for people to run SDRs off of like a Pi 3. And it looks like the Pi 4 probably have a bit more horsepower to do it. And I've been looking at the fact that they make some fairly reasonably sized little touchscreens that will connect directly to a Pi 4.

[01:04:51] So I'm kind of toying with the idea of how would it work in practice to put one of these small 7-inch touchscreens on a Pi 4, shove an SDR, RTL onto the back of it, load some software that I know is available for the Pi's operating systems. I mean, I have a Pi 4 that's running a 3D printer server. I was running two 3D printers off of it for a very long time.

[01:05:15] Well, what I'm thinking is make a small 7-inch touchscreen, basically something that will do SDR sharp and it will run ADS-B signals in a small self-contained package off of a USB battery. I would imagine. Well, because you can, let's see, the Pi 4s can power those small travel hard drives as well. So space wouldn't be an issue because you could put a 1TB SSD on that. Wouldn't even need it.

[01:05:43] Based on these file sizes, dude, most of these file sizes are 3 and 4 megabytes. They're tiny. Well, I was just thinking for like the map tiles and stuff like that. So if you wanted to cache like the continental US on there, it's going to be a couple of gig, probably maybe 10 tops. Honestly, even for that, I would probably forego the use of a virtual radar server and just use the scope feature built into RTL 1090. I mean, it takes no internet connection. It would literally just be a...

[01:06:12] I'm really thinking about like from the perspective of like if I built something that was literally just a handheld SDR scanner. What's the way to get the most functionality in the most lightweight package? Probably. Actually, you could probably do a headless Pi and just integrate that with your cell phone and use your cell phone as the sign-in screen. That's near a possibility. Bear in mind that I have iPhones and I don't know how they play with those. Or if I would have to... If I would have to get an Android...

[01:06:41] If iPhones use a web browser... Yes. Then you should be fine. Can iPhones do Bluetooth connectivity? Yes. Then you probably can do it. Because I know I can log into my Pi 4 with my... Over a browser on my Android phone. And it's any browser. You can log into it. Granted, you have to be on the same Wi-Fi. But if you have a Wi-Fi enabled Raspberry Pi, you should be able to...

[01:07:09] Or a Bluetooth enabled Raspberry Pi, you should be able to connect to that. It'd probably be just a matter of software at that point. But I mean... Yeah. I suppose the only downside to those 7-inch touchscreens is they're fairly power hungry for what they are. So if you're doing like a ManPak style system, you're just going to have to take into account the greater power draw of that touchscreen. Yeah. And again, it's something that I've only begun to look at.

[01:07:38] The big thing I'm looking at right now before I start messing around with a Raspberry Pi is... What can I do to push what I already have here? So I think the next thing to tuck my head into is going to be some of the digital decoding software that's out there. So that some of those digital signals that I'm seeing in the SDR Sharp program... I'll actually be able to listen to them and figure out what in the world they are. In that bandwidth, in the FM band, they're almost certainly HD radio signals.

[01:08:08] Just judging by where they are. HD radio signals. I'm wondering if those side bands aren't band name, song name signals tagging along with the FM. Because I know at one point my local radio stations started doing that. And you could see on your car's display what song it was. Yeah. Although it is worth pointing out that...

[01:08:31] So one of the things I'm looking at doing is actually pulling down digitized images from the NOAA weather satellites. That's one of the things on my to-do list. It's a reach item from where I'm at now. And in the course of learning about that, looking at the waterfall and everything, those NOAA satellites are broadcasting an audible carrier tone with digital data overlaid on it.

[01:08:57] So when you lock onto it, you can hear an audible, repeating carrier tone. Interesting. And then there's the digital data being vocalized in addition to that. And when you've run that through the appropriate program, it can decode that and turn it into an image. Interesting. So what you're saying is that that digital signal that we were seeing in the waterfall might be like channel information? It could be both. It could be, yeah. It could easily, it could very easily be.

[01:09:26] I mean, if it's digital, it could be digital music and the station information. Or it could even be the song and artist information for all I know. Yeah, that's fair. I mean, the NOAA satellite picture information would be phenomenal for weather, especially during hurricane season for you guys. Live weather updates when the power's out? So yes and no. There's some limitations with that.

[01:09:54] The NOAA satellites, what I can do with the equipment I have is I can lock onto, is I can download the APT images that are being beamed down on. And roughly speaking, I think they're in the VHF band. Okay. If memory serves me correctly. 140 megahertz, give or take, 146, 147, somewhere in there. Those NOAA satellites are NOAA 15, 18, and 19.

[01:10:23] Each one of them operates on a slightly different frequency. But I can literally catch those with these rabbit ears with the ear set to 120 degrees to the right length so it's resonant. Right. And with the software I already have, I'm really just waiting a couple of days for the next satellite pass because that's the thing is that these are low-Earth satellites. Low-Earth orbit satellites. So I have to wait until the next pass comes pretty close to over my head before I can give it a whirl and see if I can catch it. How often do they come through?

[01:10:54] It'll come through once, twice a day for several days, and then the path will drift further away from me. Okay. So I would get a couple bites at it every month. Okay. Well, that could still be useful. It could be. But what I was going to say was that the APT signal is kind of low resolution. I mean, APT, and forgive me for not remembering an hour and 10 minutes into the show, I probably should have looked it up and had it written down someplace. But, you know, this is an amateur operation.

[01:11:23] APT standard was state-of-the-art in the 1960s. Ah, so the resolution is fairly low. There's a lot of noise in the signal. Those satellites also broadcast on L-band, which is a microwave. Those images are very high resolution and very nice. But you also need a small satellite dish to pick them up. You would. Now, that being said, there is a YouTube channel out there called Save It For Parts.

[01:11:52] Because I want to be this dude's friend, even though he lives in Minnesota. He is a nerd, and I mean nerd in the most friendly, heartwarming way possible. He's a gigantic nerd that makes me look like a stoner surfer dude. Oh, dear. Like, oh, dear. But cool dude does a lot of satellite, does a lot of SDR projects, a lot of satellite-based projects. And he's fooled around a lot with this stuff.

[01:12:21] I mean, being able to listen to digital radio signals and being able to download the APT images may try my hand at trying to listen to the ISS just for fun. Yeah, why not? I mean, those are a couple of things I have left on my plate to play around with SDR. But for me, the big thing I wanted to do was I wanted to get SDR trunk running, which I have. And at this point, I have the entire LWIN, the entire Louisiana State trunk system is sitting in this laptop at this point. Hey, that works, man.

[01:12:51] Yeah. And I was able to get the ADS-BH software running with RTL 1090. So, you know, like the thing of it is, is that it's not, I guess it's not super common knowledge, but like FlightAware and AirNav, you can submit a request to those websites to not display your aircraft information.

[01:13:15] Oh, you know, wasn't there something about some artist recently that was getting tracked and stalked? Yes. So you are required as an aircraft operator to run your transponder, but you can send a request to AirNav and FlightAware and tell them, I don't want you showing it on your website. And they have to comply with that. This thing doesn't give a damn. They're sending the signal out. I can track it.

[01:13:42] Now, I probably won't be able to figure out who it is, but I can figure out what kind of aircraft it is. I can look at their tail number. I can look up the information about what, where they've been and where they're going. So like, to me, the biggest thing about. It's a fair question. I did answer him in the comments that it's information gathering and signals intelligence. That's really what. Yeah.

[01:14:04] And I'll cut Stuart some slack on this because by his own admission, he was horsing around with my wife, which is why he missed the front loading on this, where we talk about like why I duck my, I dip my toe into this. But just for the people that came in late, like this came about because when I taught the communications class for Cypress survivalist, it occurred to me that I wanted to push the signals intelligence portion of that class further and offer more.

[01:14:29] And, you know, we talked a lot in that class about like using your radio as a scanner. We talked about different opportunities to gather signals intelligence from your local area. And then it occurred to me that SDR gives you the ability to find more information about the radio frequency range in your local area. And whether or not that's useful is a question of, can you make that information useful? Can you find that information?

[01:14:57] But what this gives you is the ability to find those signals that no scanner, no handheld radio is going to be able to find. Like, like the point we raised very early on was if I want to listen to like one of five, three FM in my local area, that radio back there will do it. An AM FM radio in a car will do it. Like, you don't need this. But as we were looking at that, we started seeing, oh, there's a digital signal here and there's a digital signal there and there's this and there's this and there's this.

[01:15:27] And those are all things that an AM FM radio would not have shown you. But you can see them with SDR. A handheld FM AM radio is not going to show you that. Yeah. So, like I said, like this is not to me, this is not a plea to like throw your ham or your GMRS radio in the trash because your ham and GMRS radio are going to do things that your scanner will do things more efficiently than this will.

[01:15:53] But what SDR gives you is a window into a world that the other pieces of equipment will fall short on because that simple, the simple inability to graphically represent the entire radio frequency from HF all the way up to almost microwaves. That is something that even your high end HF radios that do have a waterfall, they're not going to be able to show you VHF, UHF and so on, so forth. Interesting.

[01:16:23] I mean, I can see where it would be useful. I don't know if I will personally get into it. I have too many things going on in my life already, but I can see where as a radio guy, I can see where it would be intriguing and I could see where it would be useful at the very least to find out who's talking where, when, and potentially how you could listen into it. Yeah. And I wouldn't even count myself as like a radio guy.

[01:16:52] There's guys that know plenty more about all this stuff than I do. For me, it more, it is more of a, like, if you want to justify it as a curiosity, it's like 40 bucks to get into. It's, it's stupid cheap. This is not a, this is not a price restrictive hobby. If you want to justify it as a hobby, there is all sorts of depth to how far you want to take SDR if you want to continue to pursue it.

[01:17:18] Because once you have the hardware, then the only thing left is the software and the implementation and, you know, just learning more about it, learning how you can apply it. Right. And if you approach it from the perspective I do of is an opportunity for signals intelligence that not many other things in this price range will give you, then it's another tool in the toolbox.

[01:17:39] I can tell you that several years ago during the summer of love, we all remember that, there were, there was a protest happening in New Orleans down on the other side of the lake. We didn't really have any expectations. It was going to threaten us up here on the North shore. We really didn't, we really weren't super concerned, but I did have a little bit of a concern because if that protest had come up the bridge and jumped into our part of town, we're only a mile and a half from the North end of the bridge. Okay.

[01:18:08] So it would have been really nice to be able to listen to the local first responders, the local fire department, the local interop channel, the local state police, and just have that extra intelligence gathering apparatus there to tell me, is there something about to happen that we should know about before it comes to my doorstep? Is there a situation evolving? Yeah.

[01:18:30] I mean, ultimately, like that is always my, that is always my thing is I want to know about problems when they're way out on the other side of the horizon. That's what SDR is to me is an opportunity to gather intelligence when the problem is way off on the horizon before it's a problem that's on my doorstep. And then I get extra time to decide how to deal with the problem or is it even a problem worth dealing with? And if there's, and here's the beautiful thing.

[01:18:57] This falls into the same bag as the guns, the ammo, the food, the everything else we do in preparedness. Because if, if a, well, that, and if a bad day never comes, I'm still going to shoot the guns because shooting's fun. Yep. I'm still going to shoot the ammo up because it doesn't go bad. I'm still going to eat the beans and the rice. Eventually I'm still going to play with SDR. True. We waste plenty of money on things that don't have the capabilities this could potentially give you.

[01:19:27] Okay. Stuart, I, because I love and respect you as a mentor, I'll go through this. Some yes, some no. So yes, if you're curious, if the, if the, the, uh, if you're curious, if the trunk radio system in your local area is encrypted or not, go to radioreference.com. And you can do some looking into about what trunk radio systems are in your area.

[01:19:54] And you can find out if they are encrypted in, in my case, there are certain talk groups that are encrypted and there's a lot that aren't. So like, even though the, the one I would have loved to have listened to would have been like St. Tammany Parish Sheriff Dispatch. Cause that, that's, that's my area that I would have loved to have known who was getting the popo called on. Put it that way. That channel was locked down. Can't listen to it.

[01:20:21] But what I can listen to is a lot of the fire and EMS channels. I can listen to all the interop channels. I can listen to the state police. Um, come to find out there are apparently interop channels specifically for, um, the, the army national guard and the air national guard. If they have to coordinate with local law enforcement.

[01:20:41] So like I was telling Nick at the beginning of the show, to me, those interop channels being, you know, being unencrypted means that if we have a serious situation happening and we do have all these agencies talking back for those interop channels, it'll all be wide open. And I'll be able to listen to all of it. At the very least, you'd be able to gather the information they're sharing if nothing else, which is fantastic because that's probably the most important information. Yeah.

[01:21:08] It's one of those situations where like it's slightly disappointing that I won't be able to list. I won't be able to creep in on all these encrypted, you know, talk channels during normal times. But it does tell me that the, the channels that are unencrypted are the ones most likely to be used if all hell is breaking loose. So it's kind of like as a hobbyist, oh damn, that sucks.

[01:21:30] But then as the tinfoil hat wearing prepper guy, the fact that the channels that are unencrypted are the ones I really want to listen to when they're talking on them. That's kind of a happy meal. So anyway, that's SDR. It's, it's a collision of like nerdery of radio sorcery and computer nerdery.

[01:21:52] It is a miasma of abandoned where pet projects dreamt up in somebody's basement, sketchy websites, GitHub. It's, it's a thing. I will make a point when I, um, when I post this to the pod, when I post this on the audio podcast, um, I will make a point of like including the link to it.

[01:22:18] I will just say that if you are curious about it, the best place I will send you to, to start would be, um, RTL SDR. It's a blog. It has links to the particular hardware that I purchased. It has links to a lot of the other things I fooled around with like SDR trunk and RTL 1090. Like there's a ton of information there and it's a good place to start. It's a good place to get a good base layer of information about what are the capabilities of SDR.

[01:22:45] And, um, all I can say is, is that I wouldn't encourage you to go to any of these websites with the computer that has all your passwords saved on it. Cause some of them are a little bit sketchy and you probably want to load it on a laptop that you wouldn't mind baptizing. If suddenly it starts speaking Chinese, but it's so far, it's proven to be a really interesting bit of nerdery for me to get into.

[01:23:09] And like, I see it as an opportunity for, I see from where I'm at now, I see an intelligence gathering, gathering apparatus to go and like download the APT images from Noah and listen to the ISS. That's just, I'm just a nerd. Yeah. That's gravy on top. That's just, I'm a nerd. Yeah. And why wouldn't I? Well, it helps you learn your tools. Yes. I will say that part of what, part of what I personally have had to get in here.

[01:23:38] And it's something I didn't show is that on the desktop of that laptop is, um, two cheat sheets. One of them has the, uh, the Noah frequencies because, or not the Noah frequencies, but the Noah satellite frequencies. Cause each satellite's on a different frequency. And the other one is the, uh, approximate antenna links.

[01:23:56] I have to dial that dipole or that monopole into for different frequency ranges because the, um, the dipole has like extendable leads and the monopole was obviously telescoping. So like, depending on what you're trying to listen to, you got to go over there and fool around with this. Oh, absolutely. You got to have the right frequency. What I did for tonight was I set it to about 700 megahertz. So it would work the best for SDR trunk. And I just had to leave it cause it's like all the way across.

[01:24:26] I had to leave it there for RTL 1090. And I knew it'd be pretty close, which worked out. Turns out it wasn't bad. No, it seemed very usable, at least for the local area. I mean, I was able to, like I was telling Nick before the show started, I, uh, I was tracking 10 or 12 aircraft yesterday afternoon. Nice. Yeah. So before we wrap it up, any questions, any burning desires, lingering wonderings?

[01:24:54] I think that it's definitely something that I probably will not use, but I can see, I can see where it could be very useful. I would just have to have more time in the day to dedicate to learning it. I mean, you know, shelve all your fork of your 40 K stuff for a couple of days. You find the time. Hey, I'm currently not working on any 40 K stuff.

[01:25:23] I'm working on a steady rest for that lathe right now. What? Yeah. I'm working on a steady rest for that lathe so that I can thread a barrel for a friend of mine. So we'll get to that. That seems like a worthwhile cause. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, I don't want to belabor the show too much. We're like an hour and 25 minutes and listen to me talk about the nerdiest BS. Oh, it's definitely interesting though. It looks really cool.

[01:25:51] It looks like it'd be a lot of fun to play with, but dude, I have so many things going on. Yeah. It's, I mean, it's one of those things where I encourage anyone that's remotely interested to like, just try it out. I mean, like I said, for like 45 bucks off of Amazon, you get one of your six cents to me with the antennas. And then you just have to like, you know, close your, close, squint your eyes shut and turn your head to the side while you push the enter key and hope you're not downloading every computer virus known to man onto your laptop.

[01:26:21] But mine's still working and hasn't let the magic smoke out. So it must be okay. That's fair. As long as you keep either that, either that or the laptop is so ancient, the computer viruses don't know what to do in there. They're like, why are there cobwebs? Or the viruses are so ancient, the operating system that they were written for no longer exists. I mean, one of these, one of these install packages had an option for Windows XP. So that actually is a legitimate possibility.

[01:26:50] Yeah. Yeah. It's an interesting word. Well, we'll go ahead and roll this out. I will just say that if anybody out there in listener land, if y'all decide to stick your toe into this and you get stuck, just, you know, reach out through the podcast, through Instagram. You can go to our contact sheet on MOF podcast.com and in the subject line, Phil, please help. And I'll, I'll point you in the right direction as best I can.

[01:27:19] I'm not a genius at this. I just figured it out the hard way through multiple repetitions and beating my face against a wall. So I might be able to help you figure it out too, but just, you know, patience and whiskey and perseverance. Mostly whiskey, a little bit of perseverance, a lot of perseverance, a little bit of patience. There you go. All right. Well, matter of fact, this podcast is going out the door until next week.

[01:27:46] Thanks again to the patrons for giving us the green light to back up the recording time and the release date for the audio podcast. You're going to allow this man to get into bed at a half or half decent hour. And I will get this edited and chopped up and it'll go out Saturday morning. And if you're listening to this anywhere except the audio podcast, it'll start coming out Saturday morning. If you're listening to this on the audio podcast, wondering why it's a day late. That's why blame my work. Not me. Talk to you later, guys. Bye. Good night.